The Competition

I spent a couple hours this weekend trying out the BlackBerry PlayBook and Android 3.0, Honeycomb-powered Motorola Xoom tablets. I'd tried the PlayBook and seen the Xoom before at CES 2011, but both were unfinished at the time and I was interested in seeing what the shipping versions were like. Unfortunately, the shipping versions were still unfinished, or more properly, unbaked. They reminded me of cookie dough.

Cookie dough has all the right ingredients, so much so that people can and do enjoy it in its raw, unbaked state. They nibble at it, lick it off mixers, and eat ice cream filled with chunks of it. And why not? It's delicious... In nibbles and licks and chunks. But no matter how good it is in small doses, you inevitably wish someone would just bake it already.

Turns out when you stop the ridiculous practice of comparing Android (an OS) to iPhone (a phone), and compare Android to iOS (another OS), Apple's operating system outreaches Google's by 59% in the US, or 37,868 phones to 23,763.

Now Android growth is still accelerating faster than iOS, and if nothing changes, Android will eventually eclipse iOS, but this remains a far better, saner, and more sensible comparison than the previously, convenient to the point of manipulative "phones that run Android vs. phones that run iOS" numbers we've been subjected to in the past. This is "devices that run most Android apps vs. devices that run most iOS apps". It's far more meaningful to everyone, from Apple and Google to developers.

As part of his epic BlackBerry PlayBook review, our good friend CrackBerry Kevin put RIM's new tablet browser one-on-one against the great one -- Apple's iPad 2. That's right, we have yet another entry in our browser battle series!

When we put the PlayBook head to head against the iPad 2 in a browser shootout (see below), we saw pretty comparable page load times but did notice on websites where there were flash-based advertisements present, this would slow down the PlayBook by a few seconds while the iPad 2 would serve up a faster loading static image. Disabling flash evened out the load times.

Check out the video after the break and if you haven't already, check out the rest of Crackberry's PlayBook coverage! (Then rush back here and tell us what you think!)

Our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, writing for sibling site PreCentral.net lands an exclusive first look at an HP/Palm webOS slab device, potentially code-named Stingray.