The BlackBerry PlayBook was a tablet far ahead of its time

Summary

Back in 2011, BlackBerry released both its first and last iPad competitor: the PlayBook tablet.
The PlayBook was ahead of its time in many ways, shipping with features not available on competing tablet computers at the time.
Ultimately, the PlayBook failed to compete with Apple’s iPad in the tablet market, largely down to a lack of app developer support.

When it comes to the consumer electronics industry, nothing excites me more than the tablet product category. The very notion of mobile-first computing is enticing: a single sheet of glass that serves as a vessel for productivity, creativity, and content consumption? Sign me up.

Back in the early 2010s, after the release of the first Apple iPad, the tablet industry was in a relative state of flux. There were a number of competing platforms, hardware makers, and software solutions all vying for a slice of the rapidly expanding market, and it was unclear who would come out on top.

Among these market players was BlackBerry — the Canadian phone maker that briefly dominated the pre-iPhone and Android handset scene with its line of business-oriented smartphones.

Some 13 years later, we can look back at the PlayBook in hindsight.

Blackberry would release its PlayBook tablet onto North American store shelves in April 2011, with much fanfare and hype surrounding its launch. At the time, BlackBerry (then known as Research in Motion or RIM) was still a somewhat dominant force in the mobile tech scene, and there were high hopes that the company’s expansion into the tablet market would prove successful.

Of course, history often plays out in hard to predict ways, and this is particularly true of the uber-competitive and dynamic tech landscape. Some 13 years later, we can look back at the PlayBook in hindsight, and see where BlackBerry went wrong (and right) with its ill-fated tablet PC.

BlackBerry PlayBook

BlackBerry’s 2011 attempt at creating a competitor to the Apple iPad, the PlayBook was a 7-inch tablet that ran the gesture-based BlackBerry Tablet OS.

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In many ways, the BlackBerry Playbook was ahead of its time

Even though the tablet was innovative, it’s lack of a flourishing app market proved deadly

Physically speaking, the BlackBerry Playbook holds up well in 2025. The tablet’s chassis is plastic rather than a more premium material like aluminum, but it oozes quality nonetheless. Tolerances are tight, and there’s no creaking or flexing to speak of. Overall, I find the device handsome despite its prominent display bezels, which are certainly large by today’s standards.

The PlayBook is a rather compact tablet, housing a 7-inch display panel. The product launched before the so-called phablet revolution, in which smartphone screen sizes and dimensions would rapidly balloon in size. In this pre-XL smartphone landscape, 7-inch tablets like the Google Nexus 7 would go on to find some semblance of success.

For its time, the PlayBook’s specifications were fairly solid.

For its time, the PlayBook’s specifications were fairly solid — 1GB of RAM, a 1GHz dual-core processor, a screen resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels, and a choice between 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of storage. Some aspects of the hardware package — such as the front-firing stereo speakers, or the dual HD cameras — were in fact ahead of the broader tablet curb.

The crowning jewel of the PlayBook, however, has got to be its software experience. BlackBerry boldly chose to develop a gesture-based navigation system for its new tablet, doing so far before Apple popularized the interface paradigm in 2017.

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Uniquely, the PlayBook also included a touch-sensitive region within its front bezel, enhancing the usability of the then-novel gesture system. Perhaps more impressively, the PlayBook’s QNX-based operating system allowed for PC-grade multitasking out of the box: apps run in the background without switching into a ‘sleeping’ state like they do on modern-day iPadOS or Android.

The crowning jewel of the PlayBook, however, has got to be its software experience.

After booting up and playing around with the PlayBook, its BlackBerry Tablet OS 2.1 feels fluid and responsive — much more so than even some modern counterparts, like the Microsoft Surface Pro and its half-baked Windows 11 tablet mode.

In a twist of irony, it would be this same software experience that would prove to be the Playbook’s undoing. The tablet’s killer app — its progressive and innovative gesture-based OS, would ultimately fail to attract enough developers and app makers to hit critical mass.

BlackBerry’s App World remained a baron wasteland post-launch, and the company’s baffling decision not to ship the tablet with native mail and calendar apps until the 2.0 update didn’t help matters either.

In a twist of irony, it would be this same software experience that would prove to be the Playbook’s undoing.

Today, the PlayBook stands not only as a relic of the past, but also as a reminder of what could have been. Had the App World taken off, the device and its associated platform might have grown into a full-blown competitor to the iPad and competing Android tablets. Instead, BlackBerry struggled to move units to the point that it practically gave them away.

BlackBerry may not be the powerhouse it once was, but its spirit lives on: I would argue that today’s Surface Pro lineup captures the productivity-minded DNA of the PlayBook far and away better than any other tablet on the market today.