The Playbook gets tough reviews, says it cannot e-mail

RIM’s first tablet on offer, the Blackberry Playbook created quite a fuss to be hailed as one of the prime iPad contender, but when it came out – reviewers were not very excited. Now that many influential reviewers got their respective samples to play with – they criticized the device being bogged down by overdependence on the Blackberry phones, missing a few vital features like email service, and calendar.

A Blackberry without email - you would ask. "RIM has just shipped a BlackBerry product that cannot do email. It must be skating season in hell”, wrote New York Times' David Pogue. But it is true, the Playbook needs a Smartphone to access the cellular network and a BlackBerry to sync into RIM's popular BlackBerry Messenger chat platform or get secure emails. This will pose great discomfort for those without a Blackberry phone. Hack, it does not even have a calendar!

Another problem with the Playbook is that it is a Wi-Fi only version right now, which is not surprising from its above-mentioned co-dependency. Reuters reports as Blackberry mentioning that the secure e-mail services would come later, not on launch. Maybe then we can hope for a 3G + Wi-Fi model in future.

On the positive side, most reviewers were saying sans this co-dependency, the tablet is a great device, especially for multi-tasking and multimedia richness, a feature Blackberry has always failed to master. The browser is a breeze and supports flash very well in those flash-based videos and games. Techcrunch has gone as far as to mark the camera on the Playbook to be better than that on the iPad.

It was the Playbook tough luck that folks looked into what it cannot do rather than highlighting what it can. But then again, you cannot not provide users with the service you are best known for.

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