Blackberry Playbook

Size: This is the best part of the PlayBook. The 7-inch screen is perfect for fitting in a jacket pocket or purse. On portability, the Playbook wins.

Look and feel: The PlayBook design rivals the sleekness of the iPad 2. At just 14 ounces, it weighs less than the 1.3 pound Apple and the 1.6 pound Motorola tablets. But with its ingenious minimalist elegance, the iPad is still the winner.

E-mail: The PlayBook loses big-time. It lacks e-mail clients for Yahoo, G-mail and Hotmail. Those icons on the desktop simply link to the e-mail client Web site. Don’t be fooled into thinking the e-mail icons represent an actual program.

Camera: The PlayBook wins, with 3 megapixel front- and 5-megapixel rear-facing cameras that take pictures with great resolution, even indoors.

Web browsing: The PlayBook wins again. Though its web browsing speeds are a bit slower than the iPad 2, it has Adobe Flash player support that the Apple device lacks.

Media viewing: Though the Motorola Xoom has higher screen resolution than the iPad and PlayBook, the Playbook wins. Its HD video playback was impressive and didn’t miss a beat, whereas the Xoom was a bit more choppy.

Apps: This is the PlayBook’s biggest downside. Most of the 3,000 apps in its store are useless. Incredibly, there’s no Facebook or Twitter app available.

More apps and e-mail clients would go a long way toward making this device a worthwhile buy, and hopefully those features will be updated soon.

The only consumers that the PlayBook will currently appeal to are those who live and die by their BlackBerrys, and Research in Motion has left those die-hard customers waiting over a year for a tablet.

A Bluetooth connection will sync the PlayBook with your BlackBerry e-mail and calendar, but even that feature is lacking because it doesn’t update without the phone being connected.

Though the media viewing, camera and Web-browsing experiences lend a lot of potential to this tablet, the bottom line is the PlayBook feels like an unfinished product.

Hopefully, the PlayBook’s upcoming 4G version is upgraded significantly. For now, the tablet market continues to primarily remain an iPad market.