RIM’s playbook is coming and at an iPad 2 fighting price, and with iPad 2 beating features. Best of all though is the fact that not only will the Playbook take advantage of Blackberry’s app store but it will also support Android applications, BUT before you get too excited take a look at this Blackberry Playbook Android app FAQ;
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- Android applications will run via a virtual machine much like Windows on a Mac. This will require downloading an app from the Blackberry store.
- Apps as new Android 2.3 Gingerbread will be supported, however Android apps designed to run on Honeycomb 3.0 won’t be supported. This mean the 7 inch playbook will be able to use phone optimized Android applications but won’t support Android tablet applications!
- You won’t be able to just access and the Android Market and download apps to your Playbook, instead RIM will require Android developers who want their apps on the Playbook to submit their applications to the Blackberry App World.
- There may be performance and UI issues. The phone UI the Android 2.0+ apps support may look stretched possibly even ugly on the Playbook’s 7 inch screen. Also applications that are CPU or graphic intensive may run slowly on the Blackberry virtual machine.
Although the Playbook’s virtual machine and ability to run Android apps sounds good, it seems to be a far cry away from what most, including us, were hoping for.
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