[hrbuckley]

I walk to the desk where an iPad and a PlayBook lay side by side wanting to check something quickly (email, web, FaceBook, whatever). The PlayBook was shutdown the last time it was used otherwise the battery would be dead. The iPad wasn't and still has plenty of battery left. Do I press the start button and wait for the PlayBook to boot up, something that will take longer than the task I want to perform, or do I pick up the iPad and get the job done? Not much of a choice really.

Now I like my PlayBook and use it every day (at least I did until I got the Z10). The underlying technology is superior. The UI displays some interesting features but is unfinshed and lacks polish. One needs no more proof that the UI was a dead end than RIM (now BlackBerry) went out and bought a company to implement the UI for BB10. The market for devices that run QNX is probably tiny and already satisfied.

QNX is a good OS, and any company that tries to build a super/smart phone without a real time OS underneath will eventually run into difficult issues. But users won't care about that until the issues affect their usability. As a third party developer for BB10 I can't take advantage of the rich feature set of QNX that I can when I'm building an embeded controller for a car, router or reactor. Since most of these features require priveledge access I probably never will.

The only compelling reason for using BlackBerry that doesn't come down to personal preference or bias is platform security, and even that is being challenged by WP8 of all things.