PlayBook owners: What you get from BlackBerry 2.0
BlackBerry 2.0 brings the Playbook a native email client. You won't have to bridge your PlayBook to a BlackBerry phone in order to check your email. The native email client would appear to be good, being integrated with GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn with all emails and messages going into one unified inbox.
The PlayBook now has a Calendar client which also integrates with your Google Calendar and Facebook Calendar. You also have Unified contacts, which are GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn contacts.
Now you have Android App compatibility. BlackBerry 2.0 has an Integrated Android App Player for running ported apps from Android to the new BB OS 2.0. The App Player is pretty much invisible as all you have to do to launch an Android app and the App Player (which is a virtual machine) starts automatically.
Before PlayBook owners jump up and down excitedly, this will not allow you to download the 400,000 apps on the Android Market, or even sideload apps. You will have access to Android Apps available on from the BlackBerry App World.
What else... you can now control your PlayBook via Bluetooth from your Blackberry Smartphone. There is a new Print to Go app which allows you to install the Playbook as a wireless printer. This has nothing to do with paper printing. This allows you want to send a document to your Playbook from your word processor, spreadsheet application or presentation creator using the print function and selecting the PlayBook as your printer. This is something that would seem to be useless in the new Cloud computing environment, but you never know.
If the PlayBook had all these when in launched 2011, I really don't think that it would have made a big difference in PlayBook sales. US$499 for the 16GB PlayBook put it head to head with Apple's iPad 2.
But if BlackBerry continues to manufacture the PlayBook and sells the 16GB model for US$250 to US$300, I think the PlayBook + BlackBerry 2.0 would be decent proposition for BlackBerry owners.