ORLANDO—RIM showed the first public demos of native email, contacts, and calendar running on the BlackBerry PlayBook, along with Android apps and high-quality games during today's keynote here at the BlackBerry World conference.
The new email, contacts, and calendar apps for the PlayBook look just like the existing apps, which require a BlackBerry phone tethered via the Bridge app—but the new apps don't require Bridge. They'll connect both to BlackBerry Enterprise Servers and BlackBerry Internet Service to aggregate multiple email accounts for both consumers and businesses.
The email app has a two-pane interface with a list of messages on the left-hand side and the full message on the right. The calendar and contact apps also sync with your servers, and the contacts app shows a contact's recent activity right below the contact information.
Tasks and notes apps will also be coming by this summer, RIM presenters said.
RIM execs also demoed the "Android Player," which will allow PlayBooks to run apps written for Google's Android OS. Developers can submit their existing Android binaries to BlackBerry App World, and PlayBook owners will download the apps from App World.
Android apps on the PlayBook appear in the main app tray just like native PlayBook apps. The icons look smaller, though. When you open an app, it opens in an "Android Player" app, but it can be full-screened and works smoothly. An app's interface expands to adapt to the PlayBook's resolution similar to the way Android phone apps look on 7-inch Android tablets. RIM has mapped the standard Android hardware buttons to BlackBerry gestures, so, for instance, swiping down from the top bezel is the equivalent of clicking Android's "Menu" button.
RIM demoed several apps, including a music app, IMDb, and GameCenter. They all ran without problems. Android apps have full access to the PlayBook's multimedia and networking features, it looks like.
A few things remained unclear. They didn't show running more than one instance of the Android player at once, so I'm not sure if you can run more than one Android app at a time. And RIM didn't specify what version of Android the Player supports, although the company demoed only Android 2.2 apps—not Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" apps.
RIM also showed off some new native apps for the PlayBook—most notably for consumers, games. Unity showed a PlayBook version of Samurai II, one of the standard demo apps I've seen before on Nvidia Tegra 2 tablets. The PlayBook version of that overhead hack-and-slash game looked pretty great. The PlayBook is a dual-core, ARM Cortex-A9 device like the Tegra 2 line, although the PlayBook uses a TI OMAP4 chipset rather than an Nvidia chipset.
Other demos came from SAP, IBM, and CSC, showing impressive line-of-business apps coming for RIM's tablet.