Skip to contentPosts
Blackberry’s first and only tablet, the Playbook has had a long and tough life. Launching before the release of the Blackberry 10 OS, the Playbook was orphaned from the start due to it’s lack of apps, compatibility, and software updates. While the Playbook itself is a sturdy and reliable tablet, the lack of a native BBM app was always a visible sign of it’s many issues.
With the launch of BB10 there was hope that a version of BBM could be ported over to the Playbook OS due to the platforms underlying similarities. When you look at the current diversity in the smart phone market, statistics show, as you would expect, that Android is at the top, followed by iOS, then BB OS, then Windows Phone. When looking at the tablet market you get quite a different picture. With tablets, unlike phones, iOS is the predominant player with over 60% of the tablet market share.
Now one could attribute this discrepancy to the fundamental difference between the beginnings of the smart phone market compared to that of the tablet market. My tablet, being the now-discontinued HP Touchpad, has had a port of Android for quite some time. What I didn’t know was that you could actually run other (abait mostly older OS’s within android). The following is a screenshot of me running mac OS 6 (system 6) in an emulator on my Touchpad. Unfortunately I was unable to get System 7 running, though apparently it was possible, which was a major improvement over 6 and would have brought a load of cool features to play with on my tablet.