The new Blackberry Playbook is on the market (at least for pre ordering here in Ontario). I was wondering if anyone here will be purchasing one and what benefits would one of these tablets offer in my real estate career?

Also, should I be looking at the 16 GB, 32GB, or 64GB?

I have a laptop and PC but have never owned a tablet. I'm not certain what kinds of features I need to look for so I can use it in my RE career.

Well, before you settle on any one tablet, you should really take a look at all your options and measure those against your own personal needs.

Tablets are one of the hotest topics on the market right now and there are boatloads of them coming from everyone.

Apple
Motorola
Samsung
HP
Toshiba
Viewsonic
Lenovo
Asus
MSI
RIM (blackberry)

Just to name a few and that does not capture even half of the number coming to market this year alone.

You also need to figure out what OS you want the table to run.

iOS (Apple)
Android (on most of the competitive products to Apple)
Win 7 (not a great choice for a touch OS, but has some advantages)
Win 8 (not available until 2012)
WebOS (on HP machines, may or may not be on others)
QNX (Blackberry)

There are some very strong reasons for going with Apple given their user experience, ease of use, iTunes app store. However, there are also some challenges and experiences on an ipad that are not ideal.

There are some pretty good reasons to go with a Win 7 type solution. If you live in a PC centric world, connecting up no Msft devices to a Win network (home network for example) can not only be difficult, in some cases, it just can't be done. There is also the matter of dealing with Windows based docs and file formats. For example, trying to view/run a powerpoint file on an Apple iPad is a painful experience. Same is true with many MS office type docs. On a Win 7 system, this is not a problem. However, it is not all rosey for Win 7 systems. Win 7 is a less than ideal touch experience (to put it nicely) and therefore, can be a show stopper. However, it is also an interface that most PC users know and can easily navigate around in.

WebOS. Could be a great OS, but has yet to be proven in a tablet environment. This is basically the Palm OS and is a proven experience in early smartphones. It should translate over to a tablet pretty easily. However, no robust app store like iTunes could limit the number of useful apps available.

QNX (blackberry)...proven well in the blackberry space. Very strong presence in the smartphone market. Good MS exchange support for connecting to corp. email accounts, etc. Fairly decent app store. However, Apple and Android continue to isolate RIM to a smaller and smaller piece of the pie.

Android. Clearly the number 2 OS of choice for smart devices like tablets. Rapidly growing marketplace for apps. Tons of new devices appearing everyday. However, it is a bit of a wild west. It's growth in h/w and apps are not keeping pace. Developers cannot possibly test on every different platform out there so odds of finding an app that just isn't quite all that stable is higher here than in a more managed environement like Apple or Blackberry.

You should take a long hard look at what you want out of your device and whether it makes sense to get a tablet at all or whether the features you desire are better handled by a smartphone. I am not saying you should not get a tablet, only that you should first examine what you want out of a device. For example, is this to replace a laptop or PC or is it a companion to a PC? Are you looking for something with more processing power to create AND view content (movies, photos, email, etc.)? Do you want something more on the thin/light side and willing to give up processing power to get it? Is Windows based applications and file formats important to you? Do you need all day battery life? Do you want soemthing with a docking station so you can easily connect up an external keyboard/mouse and possibly a 2nd screen (monitor)? Are apps important to you? If so, then somethign with a robust app store should be considered?

These are just a few questions I suggest you ask yourself. There is no right answer, but there are certainly a lot of wrong ones.

By the way, I work in high tech for a major chip company that sells hardware to most of the people on that list. My specific job is to spec and enable devices like tablets (as well as other platforms and technologies) so I deal with this stuff all day long. I also happen to be starting my own app development business on the side for fun...so I spend a long time trying to figure out what platforms we want to develop on and the channels in which we want to sell our apps through.

Good luck in your decision. Would love to hear what you choose and why.

Wow, thank you so very much for taking the time to offer your knowledge on the subject. There is definitely a lot to think about. I will have a look at a lot of the others you mentioned and if I have any questions, I'll be sure to contact you.

Is there someplace on the net that I can read up on all the tablets that are available and read the specs and possibly some consumer opinions on each?

Sorry, just saw your response. There are a lot of different review sites that will have info on tablets. I don't know of anyone that is specifically developing a site just for tablets. The problem with some review sites is that they can be biased at times or by author. Therefore, I would not recommend using only one site to make any determinations. It's best to read a handful of reviews to get a clear picture of any specific tablet or technology.

Now, some of these reviewers can get rather technical and use jargon but that is likely to be the case with most reviewers. Another thing to consider is that most of these reviewers are approaching from a PC centric viewpoint. Therefore, they may still run a lot of PC benchmarks in which to determine the tablets overall performance. This is not a great way to measure performance because most of the workloads the benchmark will run are either don't care or scenarios the tablet would never see (3D gaming, Video/MP3 encoding, etc.). It is highly unlikely that you would be using a tablet to rip/encode your music or video library as that is something you would typically do on a PC as it is a compute intensive task. Yes, you would use the tablet to play back the files, but not encode them. Therefore, it does not matter how good/bad a tablet would score at ripping music files as it only matters that it can play them back once ripped.

So with that said, there are a variety of review sites that would likely have some tablet related reviews...

Anandtech
http://www.anandtech.com/

ARS Technica
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/reviews/

http://www.tabletpcreview.com/

Cnet
http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/

There are plenty of other sites and it may be worth doing a search to get a broad spectrum of viewpoints.

Good Luck.

Regards,
Jay

Thanks Jay, I usually do a lot of research before I purchase. I appreciate the links and will have a look at them.