Kenny Hemphill
Cast your mind back a few months to the start of the year, when Apple boss Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. We’re in a large auditorium in San Francisco, crammed with developers, journalists and Apple fanatics. The mercurial CEO sets the scene by highlighting what Apple believes is a gap in the market between the smartphone and the laptop. He then produces the company’s latest gizmo, designed to slot neatly into that gap: the iPad. Having described it briefly, he turns to a black cloth bag behind him and pulls something out. ‘I’d like to show it to you now,’ he says, before displaying it, as he beams like a proud father.
Having done that, Jobs highlights the key features of the iPad using a mock-up in a Keynote slideshow. Then, crucially, he sits down with the iPad and demonstrates how it works by using it. As he does so, the screen behind him displays the contents of the iPad’s display. Not a mock-up, not a render, not a pre-recorded video: a live demo of the iPad in action. At one point, the camera behind him peers over his shoulder at the iPad, and you can see that what’s on that screen is identical to the image projected on the large screen for the audience to see.
For those of us who have been watching Jobs do demonstrations like that for more than a decade, it seems like the natural order of things. It’s not, at least not for other technology companies. Take Research In Motion, for example. It has decided that the growth in demand for tablet computers is so great that it can’t ignore it. In danger of being swamped by the iPad and the endless announcements of Android-based devices, and with one analyst after another popping up to speculate on the likelihood of a BlackBerry tablet in the coming months, it made an announcement. At Rim’s developer conference in San Francisco, CEO Mike Lazaridis unveiled its tablet aimed at the enterprise market. It’s called the Playbook. Did I mention it’s aimed at the enterprise market?
I’m not going to dwell on the anachronistic name (for which the only explanation I’ve heard is that ‘playbook’ is the term used in US sports circles to describe game strategy and tactics), nor on the fact that it can only connect to the Internet over wifi (something that won’t endear it to network operators). I’m much more interested in the device itself – or, more accurately, whether it actually exists. The evidence for its existence seems pretty strong: we know its precise specification and we know what it looks like. We’ve seen its user interface and what it can do. We’ve even seen Lazaridis brandishing one at the announcement. Or have we?
Look again at the video of Lazaridis’ presentation. What exactly is he holding? It looks like a Playbook, as he described it. Yet, he never actually uses it. He doesn’t switch it on or off. In fact, the screen stays on full brightness for the whole time it’s seen on stage. That in itself is a bit odd. Most battery-driven devices would at least dim the screen brightness after a period if inactivity. Now watch the promotional video. There’s no Playbook in that either. There’s some very clever CGI of the interface appearing on bus shelters and the sides of buildings. There’s no actual Playbook in sight, however.
Surely, if this thing actually existed, Rim would have shown it working and demonstrated just how great it thinks it is. Wouldn’t it have allowed developers and one or two select members of the press to have a few minutes with one? I think it would. The fact that it didn’t leads me to believe that the only form in which the Playbook currently exists is in the dumb prototype, if that is what Lazaridis held in his hand during the announcements, and in blueprints at Rim HQ. That would also explain why you won’t be able to buy a Playbook for Christmas. Rim says it expects to ship ‘early in 2011′. That, of course, could mean any time between January and April. Plenty of scope for dealing with unexpected problems, such as actually making the thing.
Does it matter whether or not the Playbook exists yet? That depends on who you are. For most of us, the answer is no. We’ll either buy it if and when it ships, or we won’t. For Rim’s competitors and shareholders, it matters a great deal, though. The tablet market is so hot right now that stock prices rise and fall based on the expected success of a company’s products in that market. With nothing to offer, Rim was in danger of seeing its stock price fall as companies such as Apple, Samsung and HP grabbed market share. The announcement of the Playbook means that it can now point to that as evidence of its likely future prospects. That will help its stock price in the short term and, ultimately, as this is effectively a zero-sum game, act as a brake on its competitors’ stock. Whether it’s a smart move or one born of desperation will only become clear when the Playbook is launched, by which time the market will be more crowded and Apple may already have demonstrated iPad Mk 2.
