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Saturday, June 2, 2012

Blackberry Playbook review

Wirehead's son wanted a bigger tablet. He had been using an IPad for about two years but wanted a larger unit.

The Samsung Genesis one of the better units but it is pricey. Most of the tabelts are 7 and 10 inch models and sometimes a 9 inch.

A lot of the units use Android 4.0 also called Ice Cream Sandwich.


The current tablet processor is a CORTEX A10 which has 1.5 GHz CPU. Many units have internal RAM for the OS and external SD RAM for storage.

Every unit we looked at used an 802.11B/G/N wireless connection. Some units also offer Blue Tooth and have both an audio and USB port.

The 7 inch model will be large enough for most people. Rightardia looked at a lot of tablet reviews and narrowed our search down to Le Pan and Coby because the even the 10 inch models were around $200. the amazon user reviews were four star on both models


After all of that research, Wirehead's son bought a Blackberry Playbook. OS2.0 that uses the RIM OS built by recently acquired QNX.


RIM intends to also offer 3G and 4G models in the future. 


Everything worked but the wireless. Rightrdia's  wireess router was set for G/N mixed mode with AES/TKIP eycryption enabled. The router was also configured for WPA-2 pre-shared key (PSK).


After two or three hours of experimentation and reading Blackberry forums on the "wireless problem" we got the wireless connection to work flawlessly.


The biggest problem was playing YouTube videos. The videos would often time-out and the wireless connection was bursty according to ping tests.

Here's how we fixed the Playbook wireless:
  • Use the older 802.11G protocal
  • set AES encryption only.
We cannot understate the importance of using WPA-2. Do not use the older WEP or WPA protocols. Only WPA-2 is secure. If you want to keep the government out of your network, use a 16-digit password which will take years to break. 

At minimum use  12-digit password that uses a mix of both upper case and lower case letters, numbers and special characters

See http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/27/rim-introduces-playbook-the-blackberry-tablet/

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