BlackBerry PlayBook For Dummies

By Corey Sandler

Use your BlackBerry PlayBook for work and for play—thisbook shows you how

For all you business road warriors who don't go anywhere withoutyour BlackBerrys, the road just got a little more comfortable. TheBlackBerry PlayBook is a tablet is your go-to-gadget for working onthe go. Learn how to take full advantage of this powerful newcomerto the tablet market with this full-color For Dummiesguide.

You'll discover how to use your PlayBook to connect to corporatesystems, manage your finances, keep track of your travel and otherschedules—even how to use the PlayBook as an e-reader orportable entertainment center. Take full advantage of its webbrowser, media players, two cameras, third-party apps, and more,with this practical, four-color guide.

• Helps you get up to speed on the BlackBerry PlayBookdevice
• Translates techno-babble into clear and simple language,explaining how to use your BlackBerry PlayBook to access theInternet, your own office's intranets, and more
• Explains techniques, features, and technology to newcomers whoare new to tablet devices, as well as to seasoned users who seekinformation about the new QNX operating system, software options,and new apps Covers how to set up the PlayBook and customize it foryour personal needs
• Explores how to locate and download apps and programs, managefinances, oversee travel and other schedules, use your new PlayBookas an e-reader, multimedia device, and more

Baffled by your BlackBerry PlayBook? Become a PlayBook poweruser in no time with BlackBerry PlayBook For Dummies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Sep 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781118167243

Corey Sandler

Corey Sandler, considered one of the pioneers of computer journalism, was the first Executive Editor of PC Magazine and one of the founding editors of several other national publications. He has written more than 200 books on computer, business, history, sports, and travel topics. 

Book preview

Part I

Getting Acquainted with the BlackBerry PlayBook

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In this part . . .

To use one of the current buzzwords of consumer electronics, when you unbox the BlackBerry PlayBook, you hold in your hand a lifeless, mute slab of plastic, glass, and electronics. There isn’t much to see. In this first part of BlackBerry PlayBook For Dummies, I introduce you to the machine’s soul, beginning in Chapter 1 with a tour and explanation of how to bring it to virtual life. In Chapter 2, you lay hands on the touchscreen (and the active frame that surrounds it), and I show how you can control the BlackBerry PlayBook with a touch, swipe, or slide of a finger or two. And I show you how to use a USB cable to exchange files with a personal or laptop computer. In Chapter 3, I introduce you to one of the PlayBook’s distinguishing characteristics: its ability to connect wirelessly to a BlackBerry smartphone (and eventually to other devices) to share and synchronize data as you move about from home to office, office to office, and just about anywhere in the world. In Chapter 4, I explain how the device achieves wireless communication: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and (on some models) cellular radios.

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Chapter 1

Presenting the PlayBook

In This Chapter

arrow Exploring the PlayBook

arrow Using the PlayBook for productivity

arrow Making beautiful music

arrow Venturing out onto the Internet

arrow Reading a PlayBook book

arrow Commencing our exploration

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The BlackBerry PlayBook, of course, is not the original tablet. Among the first were the pair carried down from Mount Sinai by a fellow named Moses several millennia ago. They were, I suppose, state-of-the art at the time: chiseled stone that held the Ten Commandments. And for the record, Moses immediately voided the warranty on his tablets by throwing them to the ground. He had to climb back up the hill and wait another 40 days and nights before he could receive the new model.

Poking around the PlayBook

Research in Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook boldly goes where others have gone before. In the modern Era of the Tablet, we all pretty much know what to expect, at least when it comes to the basic components. And the BlackBerry PlayBook does not disappoint; this is a very solid piece of hardware.

This book explores its parts and parcels in great detail but here are the highlights:

check.png A 7-inch (measured on the diagonal) ultra-high–resolution bright and colorful display.

check.png A highly responsive touch-sensitive sensor system that allows you to point at, move around, and change items on the screen and permits a form of touch-typing on a virtual keyboard. Read Chapter 2 for more about your digits (not the phone type).

check.png A zippy main processor and dedicated graphics processor that allow for spectacular playback of video, photos, music, and (if you must) games. See Chapter 10 for this scoop.

check.png A very solid, purpose-built operating system for the tablet that allows you to customize and add all sorts of apps (what we used to call software) to teach your new gadget new tricks. See Chapters 6 and 9 for more.

check.png A means to connect to the Internet and to other devices (including your smartphone and personal computer) wirelessly or with a cable. Read Chapters 4 and 5 for this information.

tip_4c.eps When the BlackBerry PlayBook was first announced, Apple took multiple swipes at the upcoming tablet, saying its 7-inch touchscreen was just too darned small to be useable. Not so, said BlackBerry: the Apple iPad, they said, was too big to be portable. Eventually, the market will decide. But Research in Motion, the maker of the PlayBook, just may try to have it both ways; a 10-inch version of their tablet may arrive with the next wave of hardware from the company.

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The evolution of the tablet

I don’t think the ancient Egyptians had PowerPoint presentations in mind when they carved their first tablets around 3,200 BC. And the ancient Olmecs of southern Mexico and Guatemala of about 1,200 BC had a thing about birds, but they probably did not envision the game Angry Birds. But with a nod to Motorola in the promotion of their own tablet in 2011, here is a Reduced History of Tablets:

check.png Egyptian hieroglyphic tablet: about 3,200 BC. Nifty graphics, but not exactly a pocket-sized portable unit.

check.png The Ten Commandments: about 1,500 BC. Solid moral concepts with excellent durability (at least in version 2.0) but not very flexible; the contents could not be edited and though they needed no higher power source, moving them around was quite a schlep.

check.png Rosetta Stone: about 196 BC. One of the first multilingual tablets, but the screen was low resolution and the operating system was incomplete and rather difficult to decipher.

check.png The Age of Modern Tablets: about 2010 and beyond. Worth the wait. And the weight.

Being productive with it

Who here was surprised when RIM named their foray into the world of tablets the PlayBook? You don’t play with corporate financial details or human resources records. But think about the meaning of the word playbook, as in a listing of the tactical plans for a sports team. A football quarterback (and the rest of his team) spends weeks obsessing over the playbook and adapting it to meet varying situations brought about by the opponent or by unexpected changes to the environment caused by weather or injuries or the personal wealth of the team owner. And if you’ve ever worked in an office or a store, you know that there is an overabundance of sports metaphors: scoring a big contract, going for the extra point, sales blitzes, and high-fives. So we have come to a reconciliation with the name. This professional grade tablet is meant to complement the corporate playbook.

The heart of the PlayBook is its ability to extend the reach of your smartphone and your desktop or laptop computer (and beyond that, onto the corporate intranet and the Internet). And yes, you can also play some games, and besides, who says success at work can’t be fun?

The PlayBook, in its Bridge mode (see Chapter 3), allows you to tap into the contacts, calendar, and e-mail that is securely delivered to your BlackBerry smartphone. When you use the tablet in that way, it can be set up so that no critical information is stored on the PlayBook itself; instead, the tablet uses secure wireless communication as a window into the data held on the phone.

tip_4c.eps As an individual this may not matter to you; as an employee of a carefully managed company, institute, or government agency this may make all the difference in the world: Key to the concept of a professional grade tablet is the ability of a corporate or enterprise IT (information technology) department to set rules about exactly how the PlayBook can be used and what sort of information and applications can be installed on it.

But beyond that, you can also go directly to the Web to access e-mail, search engines, specific websites, and more. And then there is the rapidly growing library of apps that is available to be downloaded and installed on your PlayBook. As the great philosopher Yogi Berra may or may not have actually once said, it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. But it is a lot of fun.

Playing it like a boombox

You can enjoy your music collection, watch videos and television shows, listen to podcasts, and otherwise own and operate your own cable television and radio station. BlackBerry has partnered with 7digital (a British firm headquartered in London) to offer its own version of the Apple iTunes or Amazon Music Store; see Figure 1-1 for one of its pages. Here you can purchase individual tracks or an entire album. I discuss music and video downloads in Chapter 10.

But back to the concept of the PlayBook as a serious productivity tool. All you have to do is take a look at some of the help screen videos (included in the operating system) to understand how the BlackBerry tablet could be used by a salesperson calling on a client or a corporate executive making a pitch to a board of directors: the PlayBook can deliver videos, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, and all of the other tools of the modern road warrior. Come to think of it, a football coach could also use the BlackBerry tablet as a way to hold a playbook for the game, as well as videos of key matchups and game films.

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Figure 1-1: BlackBerry PlayBook offers a direct link to 7digital for buying music.

remember_4c.eps Chapter 6 discusses this in more detail, but I thought you’d like to keep this in mind: the BlackBerry desktop software, which runs on your personal or laptop computer, can synchronize your audio and video files so that you can travel with your collection as needed.

The PlayBook meets the Internet

The World Wide Web in the palm of your hand. That’s been the case since the advent of smartphones, but — and let’s be honest here — using the Internet on a tiny little screen connected to a relatively slow cellphone service isn’t always the most satisfying experience. I have thought of it as kind of like trying to read The New York Times through a telescope: you get to see little pieces of the whole picture and going from page by page is very cumbersome.

But when RIM introduced the BlackBerry PlayBook with its new purpose-built operating system it included not only a reasonably sized, very high resolution screen, but also added a real Internet browser; see Figure 1-2. You can easily see most of a full page and you can move from section to section or adjust its size using a pinch of the fingers. I discuss browsing in Chapter 5.

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Figure 1-2: The full-featured browser of the BlackBerry PlayBook shows web pages with

Flash and other advanced video, animation, and audio features.

Though the PlayBook didn’t include its own e-mail program (a.k.a client) at first, you can easily retrieve your mail from a variety of web-based mail services. (RIM has promised to include an e-mail client as an update to the PlayBook operating system before the end of 2011.) And as an Internet-connected device, the PlayBook can use just about any service that’s out there on the Web, including search engines, map programs, YouTube, and you name it.

Reading it like a book

As will become increasingly obvious if you make your way through this beautifully printed book, I am on the verge of becoming an old fogey. That is, an old fogey who is thoroughly modern when it comes to the latest electronic doodads. But I have been a professional journalist and author for more than four decades, and I can still remember the smell of ink as it was applied to paper by a thundering printing press. And I can remember the arrival of the Internet and the first bites it took out of printed literature. When the Web took off, it stole away much of the income that supported newspapers (remember classified ads?) and then came blogs and online publications that hastened the decline of newspapers and magazines. More recently came devices like the Amazon Kindle and a host of similar special-purpose electronic readers. On the one hand, any author’s heart is gladdened at the sight of someone reading just about anything in just about any form. On the other hand, digital books present a challenge to traditional publishers and authors.

Enough of the sermonizing. If you’re going to read a book on a digital device, the BlackBerry PlayBook offers one of the finest platforms for doing so. It has a screen slightly larger than that of the Kindle and its competitors, and that backlit screen is in full color and high resolution and linked to the Internet. You can store hundreds or thousands of titles in the internal memory of the tablet without adding an ounce to its already insubstantial weight.

The BlackBerry PlayBook comes with a link to the Kobo Books store, which offers a full range of titles; see Figure 1-3 for a listing of historical nonfiction. You can also download files from other sources, including free PDFs of classic public domain titles.

Things we haven’t yet imagined

The folks over at Apple were jumping up and down seeking the attention of the world’s media when RIM announced the BlackBerry PlayBook. Look!, they said, They’re introducing a tablet without having any apps to run on it. It’s doomed to fail! Guess what? When the iPad was released to a hyperventilating crowd of Apple enthusiasts in April 2010, the endless assortment of apps it sees now weren’t around. Several of those that could were merely enlarged versions of software designed for the much smaller and more limited iPod and iPhone.

Good for Apple. But let’s remember that in the history of computing it has almost always been a process something like this: a nifty new piece of hardware comes out and then developers scramble to write software that takes advantage of its capabilities. The shelves at BlackBerry App World were rather thinly stocked when the PlayBook made its debut in April of 2011, but the pipeline is already getting filled and I expect to see thousands of nifty apps available well before the tablet reaches its first anniversary. Some of the programs will be BlackBerry versions of things we already see running on iPhone or Android devices; others will be new and amazing applications we don’t yet know that we must absolutely have.

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Figure 1-3: Kobo Books comes on the PlayBook as an ebook seller, but you can get files from

other sources and use tools like Adobe Reader to enjoy them as you travel.

The PlayBook Has Needs Too, You Know

Well, obviously you need a PlayBook. But you won’t be able to do anything with it, at least at first, until you connect to the Internet and configure it for the first time. Here’s a list of everything you need:

check.png Access to a WiFi Internet point. This is necessary to download updates to the operating system and obtain a BlackBerry ID. If you have a WiFi router in your home or office you can use that. Otherwise you can use an open connection at a library, a store, or an Internet café. View Figure 1-4 to see a successful link-up.

check.png If you own a cellphone version of the PlayBook, you need an account with a cellular provider. Try as you might, you’re not likely to be able to connect to your friendly neighborhood cell tower without some sort of a contract.

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Figure 1-4: My BlackBerry PlayBook has connected to a secure WiFi system called Hudson,

automatically negotiating login and password based on a previous visit.

That’s all you absolutely need. With an updated PlayBook you can use its built-in apps. But you’ll certainly want to expand on its capabilities by loading music, video, and data files from your computer and maintaining a WiFi or cellular link for Web browsing.

And so, here are some things you’ll want:

check.png On-demand access by WiFi to the Internet. Once the device is set up, you don’t require WiFi, but without it you will have to use slower (and sometimes costlier) methods like a Bluetooth link to a BlackBerry smartphone with a data plan, or (on a cellular model of the PlayBook) a direct link to a cellular data plan.

check.png A PC with an Intel or compatible processor running at 1GHz or faster, 512MB of RAM, a USB port (1.1 or higher), and the Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 operating system. On that system you’ll want to install a copy of BlackBerry Desktop Manager for the PC; it’s available for free from www.blackberry.com.

check.png An Apple Mac, a USB 2.0 port, Mac OS X version 10.5.8 or later. The version of BlackBerry Desktop Manager for Mac with support for the PlayBook wasn’t available when the PlayBook was first released, but RIM was said to be feverishly at work on it. Visit www.blackberry.com and see if it’s available now.

check.png A BlackBerry smartphone running OS 5.0 or later, including OS 6.0. Pairing a PlayBook with a compatible BlackBerry smartphone allows you access to all of the e-mail, contacts, calendar, and other information stored on the phone and also permits use of the phone as a modem to reach out to the Internet.

check.png An account with the 7digital music store, the Kobo Books store, BlackBerry App World, and perhaps some other third-party sites so you can download music, video, podcasts, books, and apps.

check.png Some sort of padded case for your BlackBerry to avoid scratches and damage but not so large as to make the package too big to carry in your coat pocket or purse. (You know what I mean: you don’t want to make your PlayBook as large and cumbersome as something like an Apple iPad.)

Taking a PlayBook Tour

You could look at this relatively small black object with a screen, only four physical buttons, and just three connection ports, and ask, Is that all there is? Or you could revel in its simple elegance. Many users can go for days or weeks without ever touching the physical buttons. All of the interaction between humans and the machine takes place on the touchscreen and its surrounding frame (also called a bezel, which more-or-less rhymes with level). These users may exclaim, That’s all we need!

You’re going to devote almost all of your attention to just one face of your PlayBook: the part that has the screen. For our purposes (and according to the basic rules of geometry first defined by the ancient Greeks and not yet repealed) the three-dimensional rectangular object in front of us has six sides. Let us, for simplicity’s sake, ignore the fact that its corners are rounded. It’s almost a rectangle,