3 Reasons Why the Playbook is Still a Limited Tablet

So what do you use your Tablet for?  Or maybe even a better question is why invest in a tablet?  Well for one it can be a jack of all trades.  You can surf the web, use it as a video player, music player, and E-reader just to name a few examples.  What powers these actions are apps.  There are clever work arounds and apps are not everything, but sometimes apps, just make life easier.  In the case of the Playbook and Blackberry, the lack of apps isnt whats hurting them, its the lack of 3 key apps in 3 key areas.  The Playbooks main competition right now is the Kindle Fire and if you were to compare just the devices and the OS’s, the Playbook blows the Fire out of the water (no pun intended). It has a camera, more storage, better design, more processing power, and a better tablet OS.  However the one thing Amazon has is apps.  Like I said before though, its the certain key apps that are big and that is what is killing Blackberry.

First your tablet is supposed to be a great device for watching movies.  While it does have a fully functioning Youtube app, not having Netflix or Hulu (any of the 2 would be fine) completely puts the Playbook at a disadvantage.  Netflix has already said they have no plans to Support the Playbook and Hulu hasnt officially taken a stance yet.  The playbook would be a perfect fit for these apps too with its Mirco-HDMI port.  At this point, one of these 2 companies or another service need to jump on board here.  There is a video store in the new OS update which helps, but is just a very small solution to a bigger problem.

The second thing you might want to use your tablet for is music.  The Playbook puts out great sound for such a small device (seriously its quite good), however Slacker is the only major music app available for it.  Not even Pandora, which is available on basically every tech device that is made today.  Spotify in my opinion is the biggest omission though and is the one that really kills the Playbook.  Spotify is where all of my music is stored and not having an app for it on the Playbook basically renders my Playbook almost worthless for music (there are workarounds, like cloud music services, but its not the same)

Finally tablets, especially the 7 inch form factor are perfect for E-reading.  Amazon is a huge player in this market to say the least and we still can’t get a Kindle app in the Playbook. Even the TouchPad had Kindle when it launched (if you want to be the technical it was actually 3 weeks after launch and was/is still in beta). On the Playbook we get Kobo books which should be fine, except the prices are jacked up to insane levels. Comparing a few books on Amazon the prices on Kobo were always a few dollars higher and in some cases up to $6! The Playbook has definitely had an interesting road a little over a year since being released, but not having these key 3 apps in these 3 catagories hurts the Playbooks chances of ever being popular.  Rim seems to be on the right track to fix this, is it too little too late though?