Ahhh, RIM, RIM, RIM....

Well, I have the satisfaction of knowing they'll almost certainly never sell them for less than what I paid for mine - I made a game for it and got one for free.

I use the thing constantly, too... play games (there are actually some good ones...) and draw with my son, prop it up on a mirror and play music at obscenely high quality and SPL while I'm in the shower (if my wife is home and I can't crank up the living room speakers to 100db instead), use it to play shoutcast and youtube music over aforementioned speakers... Enjoy the blazing bright screen that refuses to scratch even when aforementioned son drops a half-kg stone sculpture thing on it, VNC to various computers, use any ol' web site with flash without thinking about it, and have it almost never, ever crash amidst hundreds of hours of usage... (Though for some reason the browser likes to go south when you hit 'back' on Google web apps. Strange...)

It's a great piece of hardware, and the OS, bezel swiping - which I can't imagine living without now - and speakers are enough to make it hard to imagine using anything else. Unfortunately RIM managed to take a really awesome product and do everything possible to fuck it up the posterior, hard.

They fucked up the developer system (eg. huge amounts of cryptic command line work to make the environment go, developer web site that appeared to be specifically made to make you hate RIM - if you changed your app description and hit save, it would automatically submit it for approval, which takes two weeks, and which would prevent you from editing anything in the meantime; a support form would delete all your text if you lost focus, etc etc), fucked up the development timeline, fucked up the marketing, fucked up the response to all of the above, and then fucked up development of the next phone OS so they looked like has-beens, killing sales even more.

And then they became indelibly associated with London rioters.

Not a good year.

Strange

Have you noticed how people who have used and/or bought a playbook think they're great.

Which can only bring you to the conclusion that those who don't like it are speaking from ignorance.

(Yes, I'm a happy playbook user)

Meh

No thanks RIM. Although it's slightly cheaper than the Xoom that I scored from Dixons for the missus on Monday (£249 for 32GB thanks to El' Reg!), with the Xoom, half an hour after turning it on I had Netflix and the Kindle reader both installed for our viewing and reading pleasure, GMail fully syncing and new emails showing in the desktop widget and AirBubble installed to stream the living room PC's iTunes to it as an Airplay device. Alright, so the equivalent PB is £50 cheaper, but the Xoom is Ice Cream Sarnie ready and I can't do any of the above with a Playbook without thhe much fabled new OS and its bizarre Android transalation tools unless I'm mistaken.

The fact that they've kept Balsillie and Lazaridis on the board and the new CEO used to be the COO reeks of rearranging the deckchairs on a sinking ship to me.

Great device, wrong fruit

I still like my playbook (free for me, it is the companies). Wrong kind of fruit for the "too cool for school" crowd, but the size and UI make this a fantastic device for me.

Portable enough to stick in my coat pocket, reads my kindle books, plays my movies, plays my music, lets me read my gmail (either via the app, or the browser), and has a proper browser.

Good enough for me.

People really should try one before knocking it.