Blackberry Playbook Mini Keyboard

Black Friday is upon us and there are some amazing deals to be had! Unfortunately, most items are in limited stock and only a few early birds enjoy the benefits. One such item is the Blackberry Playbook Mini Keyboard which I am using right now to write this blog. I wanted to share a quick review in case you are contemplating a purchase this holiday season.

The keyboard is priced at $69 at some retailers right now, and while not available online they may have a few sitting in stores. It is well built and boasts a 30 day battery life after full charge. The keyboard comes with a rugged leather case which is normally sold separately for about $40-50 alone, so having it available with a keyboard now is a good deal. There are sales at the moment for the rugged rubber/leather case for about $15 so if you are only looking for that, it is well worth it. Not to mention the rapid charging stand can also be had for $15 if you can find it.

Back to the mini keyboard. It is easy to set up and will link not only to a Playbook but your phone, computer, set-top box, game console or any Bluetooth HID enabled device. The keyboard comes with a touchpad which lets you right-click with two-finger tapping and also has scroll features. In this respect, it becomes quite versatile.

I found a few disadvantages however, although easy to overlook once you get the hang of using it. First, the keys on the rows are arranged in a straight grid, unlike a traditional keyboard where alternating rows of keys are slightly offset. This makes it a bit awkward to type on at first, but after a few minutes your fingers learn where the keys are and it gets a bit easier. The keys are truly small so it can be a bit of a task for thick-fingered people, but certainly lets you type much faster than using the on-screen keyboard. It is also easier on the fingers than using the keyboard on your phone if you are familiar with Blackberry Bridge.

The keyboard does not come with a charger, but relies on you to use your Playbook charger or any other USB 5V accessory plug. I am not sure if it needs 1 amp rated charger or if your older phone chargers will work to charge it (although perhaps slower) but it took me about 2 hours to get it completely charged from out of the box.

Finally, the case itself lets you strap in the keyboard with elastic holders at the corners. The problem is that the lower left corner elastic covers the on/off switch for the keyboard, so if you are planning to turn it on and off each time, it can be a pain. I usually just leave it on and it goes into power save mode after a few minutes of inactivity. As well, if you want to activate things again once your Playbook has fallen asleep, simply hit RETURN on your keyboard a few times and it will wake up the keyboard and your Playbook at the same time.

You can select text by double-finger tapping a word, but then to expand your selection you either have to use fingers on the screen to pull the tags at the end of your selected text, or if you prefer using the keyboard you can hold down SHIFT and use the left/right arrow to move your cursor.

The one other drawback is the small stand on the back of the case that you pull out to stand your Playbook vertically. It can sometimes be hard to grab it and pull it out, and it is short and so your Playbook reclines at almost a 30-40 degree angle to the table. I prefer it to be higher, perhaps 70-80 range, so I have to proper the stand leg up on something. It would have been nice to allow several options for angle, but this is a minor issue. A small piece of cardboard can be tucked under the leg to achieve the same thing, so you may have to just carry that along with you if needed.

Overall the keyboard is a nice addition to the Playbook power user. At $69 it becomes a reasonable purchase when you compare to a Playbook that costs about $120 on sale these days, and that many other similar keyboard/trackpad combinations are in the $40-60 range. However, any more than that price and it really has to be a killer product for me. As you can see by the length of my blog entry, the keyboard certainly speeds up the ability to type on the go and makes your Playbook look like a little mini laptop. It is nice and functional and looks good, can be used with other devices. I would pick up another one if they were available, but unfortunately they are out of stock. Let us hope for some more deals coming up in the next few months, because the regular price for the keyboard at $119 just doesn't justify the purchase, in my opinion, unless you are a hardcore Playbook user who must have a keyboard.

A few more things I forgot to mention. Using the keyboard clears up a lot of room on your screen which gives you much improved web functionality, especially if you are typing into web-based applications, forums or emailing/blogging online. Often when the Playbook on-screen keyboard pops up it will take up a good 30-40% of your screen space and you can barely see the website. The fact that a little mouse cursor also pops up gives you much better control over on-screen elements as well, in case you have trouble using your fat fingers normally on the screen. These features also add to improving the experience of using the Playbook and therefore the mini keyboard is a fun accessory to have! By the way, my typing has improved even further in the past few minutes and the fact that the keys are not offset on alternating rows no longer bothers me. You easily can learn to use it and be typing extremely quickly and without any finger fatigue!

Marmalade SDK for Blackberry

It has been a couple months since I received my free Blackberry Playbook and Marmalade SDK license. While the learning curve has sometimes been slow, it really is fun and relatively easy to put together "native" apps using Marmalade! Fortunately, the SDK allows porting using the same code to many other platforms, meaning that the app I develop for Blackberry will potentially also find some life on other platforms!

One of the sites that has been instrumental in providing some basics is drmop.com which has a number of good startup samples. As well, Marmalade itself comes with a huge library of examples showing the different features available to use in both 2D, 3D and user-interface demos widget demos. I am happy to say that after looking at a few basic demos, and playing around with Marmalade on Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express (also free), my physics-based game is nearing completion!

The game is similar to "Angry Birds Space" in that it involves shooting particles instead of birds (from a launch area) towards a target (a puck instead of pigs inside structures). In my case, the objective is to hit a puck with the particles, which pushes the puck towards a target zone. You have an infinite number of particles available to use, but your points go down the more particles you need to push your puck to the target. To make matters more difficult, some of the particles are charged "negative" or "positive" (some are "neutral") and there are various negative and positive-charged spots on the game field (which appear as the levels increase) which cause deflection/attraction of your shooting particle, making it more difficult to hit your target puck. There are also rectangular obstacles which reflect your particles/puck and of course the walls of the screen which are also reflecting.

While not as cute as "Angry Birds Space", the game has potential and while it may be a bit dry and purely physics-based and geometrical at the moment, I plan on improving the game  in the future by applying a "theme" while keeping the same game objectives. For example, the particles could be changed into little animals or eggs, and the puck could be made into a large round fruit. The rectangular objects could be boxes and the negative/positive charge deflections/attractions could be made to be changes in the terrain height indicating mountains or valleys.

I look forward to announcing the game on this blog when it is ready, hopefully in the next 2-3 weeks!

Meanwhile, check out the Blackberry 10 Dev Alpha Blog which I found, which features some links to pre-release apps to try out.

iPad Mini vs. Playbook Pricing Fun

Now that Apple has unveiled it's latest tablet offering, the iPad mini, we are rushing into the holiday season with Apple having played it's hand and revealing it's cards. This is bad news for Apple, unless they plan on reducing prices over the next two months. We are likely to see a few more surprises with new product announcements from their competitors (Amazon, Google and Microsoft) who are going to aggressively price their product to compete and do their best to take a bite out of Apple's sales.

There has already been much negative buzz about the pricing scheme Apple has set for the iPad mini. At least in my area, their basic cheapest 16GB model comes in at a whopping $329, followed by 32GB model at $429 and 64GB model at $529. Apple needed to follow this pricing because they are offering their iPod Touch (4" screen) at $299 and iPad 2 (10" screen) for $399. They had no choice but to price it somewhere in-between.

Some recent news has determined that Apple's bill-of-materials or "BOM" on the iPad mini comes in around $188. That means they are making $141 in profit on top (75% markup). Apple could easily reduce the price if it wanted to and still earn a profit, but that could also mean they would have to drop the price of their iPod Touch since people may prefer buying the larger screen iPad mini (if it has essentially the same functions as the iPod Touch). The fact is, competing tablets from Google, Amazon, Blackberry and many others in the 7" screen space have already set a a price level which is much lower and is now in consumer minds.

Apple is relying on brand loyalty and has positioned itself in the "luxury" tier. Sure it has a strong content ecosystem and thousands of apps, but I also sense some complacency. Apple has rode the success of the iPhone and iPad for the past few years, and they think they can continue to push out over-priced products and have droves of consumers lining outside their stores waving their credit cards. But there will be a point of saturation.

Consumers loyal to Apple would have likely already bought an iPad over the past few years. Anyone who didn't already buy an iPad is not just waiting for a cheaper and smaller iPad, but is a more discretionary buyer with no particular loyalty, looking at the entire tablet space for value. These are the buyers who likely fueled the increased sales of competing tablets immediately following the iPad mini event. Amazon reported one of it's best day of sales ever on the Kindle Fire, right after the iPad mini pricing was announced. It seems many consumers decided it was over-priced as well.

A recent article from The Gadget Masters titled "3 Reasons Why You Would Be Stupid To Buy The iPad Mini" makes the following statement (and I quote):

"The iPad Mini’s specs are comparable to the BlackBerry PlayBook in most areas. In the areas that the two differ, the PlayBook actually has better specs (1GB RAM versus 512MB RAM for example). At only $149, the PlayBook is a far more attractive option than the iPad Mini, since buyers can save $180 (and get a free upgrade to BB 10)."

For fun I decided to do some pricing comparisons to see how the Blackberry Playbook stacks up with respect to the iPad mini. At my local retailer I can get a Playbook 32GB for $149 and a Playbook 64GB for $219. Note that there is no more 16GB version available. In fact, a recent sale made the Playbook 32GB available at $129 for a short period of time before it was completely sold out. Compare this with the iPad mini at $329 (16GB), $429 (32GB) and $529 (64GB).

You can purchase 2 Playbooks with double the memory of the iPad (32GB versions) at $149 x 2 = $298 and still be $31 less than 1 iPad mini with basic 16GB size. In fact, if you want to compare the same memory size devices, you could purchase 3 Playbooks (all 32GB) at $149 x 3 = $447 and only pay $18 more than the 1 iPad mini 32GB. If you had to buy a lightning dock adapter for your iPad mini, cancel out that $18 and basically 3 Playbooks (32GB) = 1 iPad mini (32GB).

Looking at the 64GB versions, you can purchase 2 Playbooks (with 64GB) $219 x 2 = $438 and pay only $9 more than 1 iPad 32GB at $429. Your 2 Playbooks would have a combined total of 128GB, or four-times that of your iPad mini memory (32GB) at almost the same cost. You could buy 4 Playbooks (with 32GB) $149 x 4 = $596, and be only $67 more than 1 iPad mini 64 GB model.

Finally, if you bought 2 Playbooks with 64GB ($219 x 2 = $438) and 1 Playbook with 32 GB ($149) that would bring the total to $587 for all 3 Playbooks, which is only $58 more than the 1 iPad mini 64GB version. Your 3 Playbooks would have a combined memory of 160GB, compared to the 64GB of your single iPad mini, and your whole family could have fun using them.

Now the market will decide. This holiday season, we will see how many people are looking to buy tablets in general, and out of those, how many people shopping for 7" screen sizes will walk out of the store with an iPad mini. Will we get a phenomenon where people buy this device for gifts because of the associated "prestige", or to meet a certain value requirement for their gift? If you receive a Playbook as a gift, will you think the gift-giver cheapened out on you? Would you be more impressed knowing they over-paid? After all, isn't someone's love supposed to be about the amount of money they spent?

Blogging from a Dev Alpha

This is my first post written from a BlackBerry Dev Alpha. It is definitely an amazing experience! The browser works great with Google and the predictive typing makes it fairly easy and fast to type things in. I am hooked into my home WiFi network and using the phone in portrait mode.

The compatibility is similar to the PlayBook as far as the browser is concerned. I have been working away on my app and making steady progress and I'm excited to see it coming together. The biggest challenge was to convert my user-interface from jQuery to bbUI.js. However, now that I have started to use the bbUI.js framework it really is making my WebWorks app look like it was made specifically for the Blackberry 10.

I look forward to sharing more about this on my blog and also any progress made with using the Marmalade SDK in making my native C coded Playbook app. RIM has made it a real pleasure to write apps for their platform due to the amazing developer support they are providing as well as hardware for testing and for developers to keep as an incentive.

Blackberry 10 Dev Alpha

I recently began porting my app to Blackberry 10 and had some issues on my computer with the simulator and Ripple Emulator. I have worked out a few more bugs, but really needed an actual working device to test out my app and debug it fully. Thankfully, the amazing people at RIM lent me a Blackberry 10 Dev Alpha device for development purposes.

The Dev Alpha arrived with the older BB10 OS installed which appears very much like the Playbook OS, with only a couple of apps (a browser and camera). I proceeded to update to the latest BB10 developer OS which had many more apps including AppWorld, BBM, Calendar, Contacts, an improved Camera app and more. It was nice to see a bunch of BB10 Apps from various developers already included in AppWorld, some in test mode and some fully-finished for sale. I downloaded a few to check them out, and there are some really cool ones.

Regarding my own app, one of the jumps I have been meaning to take is to convert from using jQuery to bbUI.js. The interface looks very polished on the bbUI.js and is probably optimized to run very well on BB devices. While my app works with jQuery, the look doesn't fit as well and it is a bit slow. Some of the pop-up lists don't fit well and it can be hard to format things on the screen properly. If all of this is "Greek" to you, it basically means that both of these tools let you easily implement nice modern user-interfaces (buttons, dialogs, lists, sliders, etc). However, bbUI.js was designed to match the look and feel of the Blackberry 10 OS and so to make things consistent with other apps and to help users avoid confusion, using a standard user-interface (UI) is beneficial. Companies like Apple have really pushed this idea on iOS, which explains why many of the apps on your iPhone and iPad have the same "look and feel".

I am definitely excited about Blackberry 10, now more than ever. Although I already fell in love with the Playbook, seeing it's evolution in the BB10 OS (which should also make it's way to the Playbook in time) is a real eye-opener. Many people are upset about waiting for BB10 to come out, but I believe we need to give RIM the time to make BB10 a perfect 10. If it means a few more months, it is better to have as flawless and bugless an OS as possible. All of the critics will be watching, and we don't want to give them any fodder for their articles!

I hope now that many people who have phone contracts expiring in the next few months will choose to hang on to their current devices, avoid locking into a new contract and proceed on a monthly basis until BB10 comes out. At least give Blackberry 10 a try, you won't regret it. However, you may regret locking into a new phone and missing out on a wonderful new mobile platform coming in early 2013!

Does Price Matter?

Rumours have it that Apple is about to ship their latest tablet offering... The iPad mini. Even though previously Steve Jobs apparently hated the idea, Apple has seen a bulk of the market going to cheaper and smaller tablet offerings in the 7" space like the Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, Blackberry Playbook and many other $200-range affordable tablets.

For people who are loyally married to the iOS Apple ecosystem, they have had only 2 choices as far as screen size goes... iPhone/iPod touich 4" size and the iPad 10" size. So a 7" iPad is precisely in the middle of the devices. The question remains... will Apple sell millions of these things and why would people buy it?

Price leaks have already occured and it looks like the iPad mini will have to fall somewhere between the $299 iPod touch and $499 iPad. That means $399. But will this device pack in the same retina display, camera resolution and starting base memory size as the other devices? The other tablets in this size are all in the $200 range, about half the cost! If true, then Apple will make a profit and people may still buy the 7" tablet to save a few bucks yet still pay a hefty premium to secure their place in Apple's walled-garden ecosystem.

There is also speculation that the iPad mini may be made cheaper, at the expense of specs like memory and camera resolution. However, it is unlikely to be priced below $300, lest Apple start taking hits to its profit margins. Remember Google and Amazon have stated that they have been selling their tablets at cost because they plan on recouping money later on in-tablet purchases from their respective app and content stores.

And so here lies the big question. Will Apple switch around from their previous premium pricing history which made them huge profits, or will they sell the iPad mini at cost to bring more people into it's ecosystem and make money from the increase in iTunes purchases?

I see no reason why Apple would lower the price. They are dominating and will still sell millions of iPad minis despite their higher cost. However, millions of people are willing to pay a premium to be in Apple's ecosystem.

First Signs of Apple Crumbling

Over the past few years we have seen Apple take a huge bite out of the mobile and portable entertainment market (not to mention their dominance of the tablet space with the iPad). Apple has amassed a growing number of adoring fans, as well as billions in profit. With each new quarter, and each product launch (amid much hype and media coverage) it seemed as if the Apple train was speeding up and gaining a momentum that would be impossible to stop.

Now, for the first time in recent memory, there are some preliminary signs that Apple's fantasy ride is slowing down. As with any rise, there must be a leveling-off, and then a fall. I am not suggesting that Apple is falling apart, just that it is going to need to face reality again. Apple may be a victim of its own success and marketing hype engine. At every launch, Apple fans have come to expect miraculous new features. Given the fast rate that Apple has released new products, and the slower pace of true mind-blowing technological innovation, it was innevitable that Apple would hit a wall. Couple that with increasing expectations from users, and it is easy to predict that Apple's past performance would be unsustainable.

The most critical reports are not from Apple competitors, but Apple fanboys themselves. "The Apple Byte" show on CNet, usually enamoured by anything Apple related, recently pointed out some of the major misses with the new iPhone and other disappointments with iOS 6. Still, a few healthy criticisms doesn't put a dent into Apple's userbase fanaticism, but does bring Apple back down to reality... a reality of a highly competitive and inter-connected sector that is ready to eat Apple at any opportunity, and users that have an opportunity every few years to switch to another phone ecosystem or upgrade to a new tablet.

There are other signs, however, that not all is perfect. The late Steve Jobs was a well-respected figure-head for Apple who brought an almost cult-like following to the company. The new leadership is still profiting on his legacy, but it will eventually run out. They will have to begin relying on their own ideas.

The iPhone 5 was the best product launch ever in terms of numbers sold. However, it is not without flaws. All devices have issues. Complaints about the new Lightning connector backwards compatability problems, iOS 6 Apple Maps, slow WiFi connections, slow data on some carriers, brightness-level not working, and other problems populated the Apple fan-site forums after launch.

The furthest-reaching but minor problem, however, happens to be a quality control issue resulting in scratches and chips found on brand new unboxed iPhones coming straight from the factory. This has resulted in increasing pressure on Foxconn employees which apparently resulted in a strike and some violence on the assembly line in China. Although Foxconn denies the strike occurred (presumably to avoid giving any other employees an idea or to deny any bad press) it did make headlines.

The big story here is not the few minor cosmetic imperfections from the factory or a scratch-prone case, but that the Chinese factory strike brought attention once again to issues of worker treatment and it adds another negative newstory to a number of others already circulating about the latest product from Apple. This is a reality check for Apple that despite their amazing past accomplishments, impressions can quickly turn.

There is no doubt that the iPhone is a great device and Apple will continue to do well in the foreseeable future with release of the iPad mini, the Apple TV and other devices. There is still plenty of room for innovation using today's technologies... Some of which have already found their way into competitor's phones. People will want to continue to use their iOS apps and live happily in the iTunes universe, guaranteeing upgrade paths for Apple for a long time yet, even if each successive iPhone release is less and less interesting.