Well, I know I said I was gonna write some posts on the Playbook as I begin developing for it. Unfortunately, there are a number of things which have deeply turned me off of the prospect…

Incomplete APIs

Yes, I understand the device isn’t ready yet. I understand the simulators are in beta, and the SDKs are being completed. But the startling omissions in the current APIs make me seriously wonder about the device and the BB developers:

  1. No text box control. There’s a text field, but no multi-line control. So much for a note taking application or anything similar.
  2. No date picker. Seriously. Wow.
  3. No localization support. This is supposed to be an enterprise-level device, and it doesn’t have a localization API yet??
  4. No rotation support. Just… unbelievable. This is a tablet, ffs. How can they not have landscape/portrait mode available? Hell, apparently no one has even seen a sample Blackberry app that does portrait mode.
  5. No webkit engine API. They’re “working on it”, apparently. The device is supposed to be out in a month. I mean, really…

Meanwhile, the simulator doesn’t support things like:

  1. The camera API
  2. The multimedia API (you know, the thing that, to quote, is supposed to “differentiate” this device from others on the market).

It’s really quite stunning to me, and makes me wonder what other omissions there are in the application stack.

App World Application Blackholed

I applied for App World three weeks ago. And nothing. Apparently my application is being “reviewed”. Well, I ain’t spending time writing code if I’m not even sure I’ll be able to submit the thing.

Ridiculous App World Fees

Yes, the current submission fees have been waived, but it’ll be $20 per submission to App World once the promotion is over. That means every failed submission, every update, is gonna cost $20. It’s ridiculous.

Unprofessional Webinars

The webinars BB posted were, frankly, terrible. The BB consultant running them is brutal, the material is superficial at best, his delivery is moronic, repetative, and frankly, boring… they’re just bad. Meanwhile, they’re full of glaring holes, bad examples, and don’t get me started on the marketspeak.

Meanwhile, every other question seems to highlight another gap in the SDK or simulator… the number of times I heard “we’re still working on a story for that” was impressive, to say the least.

In Conclusion

Everything I’ve seen suggests this device is half-baked at best. Incomplete APIs, crappy presentations, an application process that seems to have stalled out on me, and a fee structure that seems designed to turn away smaller developers… for a $500 device, it really doesn’t seem to be worth the aggravation.