Adobe AIR Development

[T55555]

Normal user has no way to pull battery on iPhone / iPad ...

[greenfish]

The Reset button is a hard button on the top edge of the device, and on the bottom edge of the device there is a micro hdmi port, a micro usb port and a 'magnetic' power connector.

[jffurlan]

Magnetic power connectors are awesome. I've broken way too many charging cables by either tripping on them or grabbing the device and forgetting it's plugged in.

As for the aesthetics of the device, my only concern is that the power and volume buttons look out of place IMO. I just saw a top down view the other day and have to see it seems odd that I would have to reach in front of the screen to adjust those things. Even if they at least put them on the corner, or on the edge. Although this is based purely on pictures, I'm sure when it's in your hands its irrelevant.

[peter9477]

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jffurlan wrote:
[re power and volume buttons] ... it seems odd that I would have to reach in front of the screen to adjust those things.

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If you don't like them at the top, you could just rotate the tablet 180 degrees.  Then you wouldn't have to reach in front of the screen to get to them.  Same thing if you'd like to drive an external HDMI display and would prefer to have the cable coming out of the top, going away from you.

With no bezel buttons, there's no reason you can't use the device "upside down", as long as having the BlackBerry logo flipped doesn't bother you.

(Note: this assumes they fully support all four orientations in software, but I can't think of a good reason why they wouldn't want to do that.)

[jffurlan]

My app is landscape only. When flipped to portrait mode everything was stretched just it just didn't translate well. I've also only seen demonstrations of the tablet being held in landscape mode. (Not saying that portrait apps aren't happening, just that I have yet to see one.)

Your statement also assumes that each bezel isn't "hard wired" and changes based on how the user is holding the device (when flipped 90 clockwise the top bezel become the right bezel and so on, and picks up its behaviours). While I'm positive this is a given, I've yet to see or hear anything stating it.

In fact, has anyone seen a portrait demo of the playbook? Or even a portrait app for that matter...

[peter9477]

Actually, 180 degrees is right upside down, so I was talking about landscape mode still... just turned right around.  The same will apply to portrait though... you should be able to hold the device with either speaker end "up", for both possible portrait mode orientations.

As for the bezel swipes... they couldn't possibly work any other way except to move around to match whatever is currently "up" and "down".  In portrait mode you will still left- and right-swipe to switch between active apps, but now you'll be swiping in from what were the bottom and top bezel in landscape mode.

I say "couldn't possibly work any other way" because the device would simply be unusable if, for example, you swiped in from the left (where the BlackBerry logo is along the long side that used to be the bottom), and that made the app minimize "up", at 90 degrees to the direction of your swipe.  If RIM did that, not only would everyone (including me) laugh themselves silly, but they'd be out of business by this time next year...

[jffurlan]

I hear ya on the 180 degrees.

And yes, the bezel swipes couldn't possibly work any other way, I'm just saying I've yet to see anyone use the device in anything outside of landscape mode.

[T55555]

Browser and Photo applications should possible (and make sense) on portrait mode.

( And I believed that I saw some demo video shows PB on portrait mode for some applications )

[peter9477]

There was a recent video showing a presentation wherein among other things a Frogger-style game was played in portrait mode.  I didn't watch closely and can't find a link (anyone?) but I wouldn't be surprised if you could see the bottom-swipe or a side-swipe used to get out of that app somewhere in the video. 

[peter9477]

Ah, even better.. just found one here.  The quality of the image is absolutely terrible, but jump to 10:48 and watch for a bit.