Mfarhanonline Social Media News: Installing PlayBook 2 on PlayBook 1 Click here to view this gallery. Blackberry Playbook 2.0, which arrived earlier this week, is a marked improvement on the first-generation PlayBook platform released along with the 7-inch device almost a year ago. It's also still probably not enough to make PlayBook a winner in the consumer tablet race. When Research in Motion ( RIM ) first began showing off the PlayBook and its QNX-based operating system, I was impressed. The card-like interface — reminiscent of HP's now open-sourced WebOS — was elegant, smart and powerful. It used not only the screen, but the black frame around it to initiate on-screen interactions. The PlayBook was a true multitasker: with live video windows running right alongside live web pages and games. But there were also big issues. RIM insisted on a marriage between your BlackBerry phone and the PlayBook. The Blackberry Bridge should have been a cool concept: access your phone's mail, contacts and tasks on PlayBook via a Bluetooth connection. Unfortunately that bridge was rickety — and for some, completely broken. Without that connection, the PlayBook had no native email client. This was shocking, considering mail management was one of the BlackBerry platform's best features. BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0 ($199 for the 16 GB model), which launched on Tuesday , solves this and myriad other issues. Now there's a smartly designed native e-mail client. If you don't want to use BlackBerry Bridge, which works perfectly now, you don't have to. The updated PlayBook can now act as a true hub for your messages, contacts and calendar—and not just for your main e-mail account. It can also bring in Facebook and Twitter contacts. Getting Started Once I entered my username and passwords for my work e-mail and Facebook and Twitter accounts (I could̵! 7;ve don e LinkedIn, too), the PlayBook was bursting with contacts. Sending, receiving and managing e-mail worked smoothly. Unlike the email interface on, say, the Amazon Kindle Fire , PlayBook's client looks like it was built from the ground up to work with the hardware and platform. The Facebook contact integration is a nice bonus; I do sometimes like to focus on my Facebook messages. If you want to use Facebook in full, PlayBook 2.0 has a native Facebook client. RIM has not convinced Twitter to build a native client, however, so that home screen link still takes you to Twitter's mobile web site. This is fine for basic tweeting, but no good for posting photos and videos from the PlayBook. I eventually found a $5 app that resembles Twitter's new Web interface. It works OK. PlayBook 2.0 happily sucks in all your Twitter contacts, but since it thinks everyone you're following is a contact, this ends up being a bit overwhelming if you follow thousands of users. Sorry, RIM, Stan Lee is not actually one of my contacts, I just follow him on Twitter. In the messaging app, you can manage all your Twitter Direct Messages. But that’s not typically how we use the service. Twitter integration needs to be about initiating tweets — and PlayBook 2.0 fails miserably in this area. I can't tweet a photo or video from the platform, as I can on the iPad . I can, of course, tweet from within the Web browser — but that has nothing to do with the PlayBook. Speaking of the browser, it's great. Pages load quickly and zooming in and out is smooth and effortless. The 1024
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