Blackberry Playbook: Bargain 7″ Tablet

In the last few weeks the price of the Blackberry Playbook has plummeted further, to £169 in the UK from retailers such as PC World. At that price it deserved some research into what it offers & whether it’s worth a look. The tablet itself is solidly built, with a decent amount of processing power & good multi-tasking abilities. There’s an app store that offers a fair number of apps, including the obligatory Angry Birds, Plants vs Zombies, and useful stuff like free VNC clients.

The 7″ screen looks crisp & vivid, and isn’t as cramped as I’d imagined it would be. I’d viewed someone’s Samsung 7″ tablet so knew what to expect. Browsing the web on it is slick & fast, plus it’ll play Flash videos, so iPlayer, 4oD and other sites all work on it without a hitch.

The OS is soon to get v2.0, and that’s where things get even more interesting; that opens the Playbook up to the Android Market, allowing it to run a majority/proportion (not sure which yet!) of Android apps. OS2.0 will also offer MKV support, but what codecs are actually covered is unclear.

Built-in storage is limited to what you initially purchase (e.g. 16Gb), and there’s no SD card expansion. However, if you root the Playbook, there’s a method to add USB-host functionality, allowing you to attach USB flash drives.

A micro-HDMI connector allows it to mirror the display to a TV without proprietary adapters & it just works!

Here’s what you need if you want to hook it up to a TV (a few different cable lengths included):

Micro HDMI to HDMI adapter = £3.56

0.5m standard HDMI lead = £1.18
1.0m standard HDMI lead = £1.14
5.0m standard HDMI lead = £3.19

And here’s what you’d need to connect a standard USB flash drive

Micro USB to USB adapter (270 angle means it doesn’t clash with HDMI output) = £3.17
USB Female to Female adapter = £1.14

For the back of the car, I’ve gone for a generic headset mount that can also mount an iPad:

Universal tablet mount

And to protect it from scratches and minor droppage in the house I bought the official faux leather convertible case, which beats the hell out of the horrible case it ships with.

Faux Leather Convertible Case

After a few hours of research I knew it was a good deal, bought one & haven’t been disappointed. It *is* a bargain for what you get :)

Breathing new life into a Motorola Milestone

I’ve owned a Motorola Milestone for some time now.. but it’s never been the slickest of experiences and since the 2.2 Froyo update things have been a bit laggy. I’d started to look at custom ROMs, but the problem I see with custom ROMs is the risk of bricking the device, and there are a fair number of bugs in the custom ROMs which may mean I’d need to keep on top of the latest releases.

Instead of going all the way & installing a custom ROM, I went part way & rooted the phone using SuperOneClick, carefully reading all the instructions beforehand. I still messed up & didn’t run the app as Admin.. killing the app & re-running it fortunately didn’t have any nasty side-effects :)

Once the phone was rooted, I did very little else until I spotted this nice list of apps on Lifehacker. The one that peaked my interest was SetCPU, but when I ran that it topped out at 550 Mhz, which led me to find Milestone Overclock which allows you to overclock the phone without having to install a ROM that supports higher frequencies (like the official 2.2 update from Motorola).

I’m now running the phone comfortably at 800 Mhz.. but only when it needs it.. SetCPU will scale back the performance depending on what the phone is doing, which really helps with battery life.