PlayBook OS 2 has arrived: was it worth the wait?

Many Canadians — including a number of Sync readers — jumped at the opportunity to buy a discounted BlackBerry PlayBook. The $199 price tag made it an incredibly hot seller here and propelled RIM’s tablet to second place on the tablet sales chart behind the iPad. Today, the long-awaited PlayBook OS 2 update was made available for download and it’s brought a number of welcome improvements.

After just a few hours of playing with the new OS, it’s clear that this is a big improvement. For business users and folks at home, the arrival of native email, calendar, and contact apps plug a number of gaping holes. Finally, a big chunk of the core functionality that you look for in a tablet is available on the PlayBook without having to pair a BlackBerry phone.

Those of you who do own a BlackBerry, however, get to take advantage of some very slick new functionality. A paired phone can now be used as a remote control for the PlayBook, both as a mouse (by thumbing the optical trackpad or using the touchscreen on more recent models) and you can also utilize the keypad to type in text if you don’t like using the on-screen keyboard. There’s also a presenter mode that allows you to output the video from your apps to the PlayBook’s larger screen.

The PlayBook’s web browser is now a lot more polished than the original version. In addition to offering RIM’s best support for HTML5 yet, it’s generally speedier and more glitch-free. App World has also gotten a slick overhaul, and more great apps on the way thanks to the arrival of the Android App Player in PlayBook OS 2. Developers ears’ perked up when RIM offered up free PlayBooks as an incentive to port apps, and they’re starting to deliver the goods.

Docs To Go has also been updated, and the new version supports Bridge remote control functionality for presentations, richer editing support for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, and the new Print To Go app. Print To Go makes it easy to send digital copies from any computer to your PlayBook — just sign in with your BlackBerry ID, enter the PIN displayed on your tablet, and select Print To Go from any Windows or OS X print dialog box. Documents are packaged as PDFs and sent wirelessly to your PlayBook, making it extremely easy to take them along for meetings, presentations, or even as notes for your next study session.

BlackBerry Balance

BlackBerry Balance lets you lock just the work-related apps on your PlayBook

One very cool feature of OS 2.0 which is not being widely promoted, is BlackBerry Balance. Already available on other BlackBerry devices running OS 7, Balance gives businesses the ability to control the parts of the device that accesses company data e.g. email, contacts, calendar etc. The idea being that “balance” respects that there are often two sides to someone’s use of mobile device: for business and for personal stuff. With BlackBerry Balance, a company could remotely lock and/or wipe just the data that belongs to them, leaving all of the personal info intact. It can also prevent users from copying data from an enterprise app into a non-enterprise app and it can prevent certain kinds of apps from being installed on the device that might represent a security risk.

In the case of the PlayBook however, it means that you can leave all of your business apps running, but password-locked, while still having access to the personal stuff like games and web browsing. Who will want this? One word: Parents. One the iPad’s most irritating compromises is that it’s a personal device that ends up being shared by many people in the household. If you use your iPad to access business email, there is simply no fail-safe way to hand over your tablet to your to your kid without the possibility that they’ll send out a career-ending email on your behalf. Balance lets you assign a password to your company-based apps and documents, which can be locked independently of the PlayBook itself.

The other advantage to this is that companies no longer need to insist that you password-protect your entire device, which is the case currently with iOS and Android.

A few additional notes for those of you who own a PlayBook:

• The Box (formerly Box.Net) free 50GB account deal is still in effect. Download the app from App World and set up an account, and you’ll have 50GB of cloud storage that you can access directly from Docs To Go.
• A couple of top-notch games are available for free right now, too: Modern Combat 2 and Asphalt 6 Adrenaline
• A video store app is coming soon. U.S. PlayBook owners who have updated to OS 2.0 already have access, and Canadians will be able to get in on the action in the coming months.
• Those of you interested in jailbreaking (or rooting) your updated PlayBook, good news. PlayBook OS 2 can still be jailbroken, and an updated tool will be available for download soon. Once rooted, you’ll even be able to install the Android Market.