Placebo-ok?

                                                             

Accepted wisdom has told us to develop the capacity to mould ourselves to the environmental demands. Acquired wisdom has summoned us to rise above Apple. That the tablet you envisaged is going to be pitted against Apple pad is inevitable, ‘creating a niche of its own’ becomes the mainspring of the creators’ ideas. So how do you create something, which makes it seem less like itself while retaining the most of it. If you do it successfully, well, the mass-contempt for apple products is going to come by as a windfall along with the profit you raked.

Enter Samsung Galaxy tab I. It aspired to supplant the iPad dominion, and stopped at nothing to thrust itself everywhere. However, as was foreseen, the Galaxy effect died down without a cry. Then there was Motorola Xoom, Acer’s blah, Blah’s bleh operated by Android’s meh version. So on and so forth.

All right, so in the world of sitcoms when Barney Stinson constituted the term Playbook, he’d set some standards for it. So when RIM decided to name its own tablet ‘Playbook’, I am sure they must have known they couldn’t dabble with this constitution.

Let me be honest upfront, Blackberry’s Playbook is impressive. And while I say that, I disregard the existence of iPad entirely.

You know the popular adage, “Its not what you have that counts, its what you do with what you have that counts.” Since Blackberry had nothing to begin with, they rubber coated the posterior of a small ‘Dell streak’ like thing, multi-crystal-coated the frontal part, bezel bordered it and idiot-proofed it with the smart placement of the buttons by taking them off its face entirely, making it well nigh like a tablet, and a portable one at that.

The rigidity and toughness of the device surprises you. You may get a feeling that this playful little 425g device would even survive a javelin throw.  The 7.6 inches by 5.1 inches face dwindles inside to give only 7” of actual display, which may puncture your movie-viewing enthusiasm. However, it comes with the HDMI-out to connect itself to a television so everything can be watched at 1080p full HD resolution. There are two speakers on the front designed to make themselves heard, unlike the poor iPad speakers experience which were designed exclusively for Bats, probably.

However, the actual potencies of the device come from its innards and playbook genuinely impresses us with its dual core 1Ghz processor, 1 GB RAM and 16, 32 or 64 Gb storage space. Since it doesn’t come with home screen button, they have come up with new UI convention that needs you to swipe the frame from the bottom end to the upper end every time you want to go back to the home screen.  Just to be different I guess. The touch sensitivity of the capacitive display is good, but far from ‘telepathic’ sort of connection you find in those Apple displays. And when your camera is on, when you tilt the device the landscape to portrait transition isn’t nearly as fluid as you find in an iPad. User-interface is some departure from the banal cluttered-icon-oriented sight from Apple and Android, but it doesn’t fascinate you still. Google ‘Building Windows 8’ now.

Inclusion of Adobe flash is a prominent enhancement. The 5mp back and 3mp front cameras don’t disappoint but come without flash. RIM has also brought multitasking to this QNX based Blackberry tablet OS. With this you can play their favorite slide on the connected projector in that conference room while playing Angry birds without anyone noticing it. Except that they don’t really have Angry birds for Playbook yet. Wait till it arrives.

Exclusion of Angry birds reminds me that BB has managed to gorge down just 3000 apps for this OS, which is a downer in this age of fetishization of the number of apps. This would turn over the Android and the Apple hippies in their graves who willfully mate with the devices that have maximum applications, however superfluous they may be.

Mating reminds me that you can mate this Playbook with your favorite fashion accessory. Your Blackberry phone of course. Thus, suddenly giving some meaning to its existence. (My apologies to all those corporate honchos who make actual use of BB for emailing.)

All in all, the Playbook is fun, spry and an elfin little funky tablet that you can actually carry around in your pocket or your little purse. While Apple doesn’t really seek for your regard, it compels us to have that unremitting respect for its products. Blackberry wouldn’t garner such respect with Playbook. But it surprises you with its dainty structure and a different user-interface. Don’t expect anything transcendental, nothing ‘avant-garde’ about it. But it doesn’t disappoint either. Priced same as the Apple and Android tabs, one can hardly tell if this device will salvage RIM from its current crisis in Canada.

                                                                                                                       

Big, big brother.

The most folkloric image of a science professor  is some savant–ish man having that anemic appearance, sporting a shaggy beard, tatty clothes and enthusiasm that of a ruminating cow in premises other than his own subject. We stereotype him as a pedant who’d give away his marital obligations in bed, niggling over that fourier’s problem which rankled in his head all throughout the day. Never mind the querulous wife. 

However, the modern day teacher’s delight isn’t just in pedagogy.  He is timeless as Anil Kapoor. He need not sport a moustache even. Although, he’d swagger around the campus with his pot belly drawing more attention than the fat book he carries. He’s a fop, loves to groom and has singularly carved a niche for himself by the means of pronouncing ‘illinois’ in the most ludicrous fashion. His shrill ringtone, whose mood is quite incongruent with subject at hand, rouses guffaws in the classroom amongst the other things such as his open fly.  You cannot make this shit up.  His humor doesn’t merit an attention. The spasmodic coughing of the dude sitting next to you is perhaps, more entertaining. Then there’s this moment wherein you genuinely begin to understand what’s being taught and the next moment you know you’re are picked on to answer a question which was taught in the previous lecture. This discredits you further since you never sit for lectures back to back. Now you know better than to look at the professor in the eye, or to look up at all. You’re being laughed at, chewed up and spit out ‘cause you couldn’t give pertinent answers. So unless you are endued with the shamelessness of Rakhi Sawant, you feel like an imbecile and get further discouraged. And professor gloats over it. You eat up your pride and oblige and continue feeding his ego some more because you know he controls you. He genuinely has more control over you than your own self. Unlike Mobarak and Gaddaffi, he will not call air-strikes on you or bomb you with tanks. But they say ‘Pen is mightier than sword and bullets and bombs.’ He is vindictive and he will take it out in your ‘term-work’ scores. 

So you cower in fear. 

Lady professors are more often than not, resembling lady boys. Or they are cute old wizened hags. The entire idea of ‘pretty’ female teachers is too chimerical, or just a figment of porn-star-director’s imagination. There is no such confluence in the real world, so there is no incentive to attend her class. I have never been able to understand their squeamish demeanor. They get more than enough perquisites for their position, have limited working hours, have same stock syllabus that they repeat for years at length. They are quite literally revered by some vapid fan or the other. Its like being Suzanne khan. 

If only they could just guide and not domineer, empathize and not incite fear! It will cost them nothing, but it will keep us coming back. In its stead, I sit here, writing blogs.