Review: Open On in BlackBerry Bridge 2.0 When the BlackBerry PlayBook first came out, the BlackBerry Bridge feature enabled you to link the tablet to a BlackBerry smartphone (did I say BlackBerry enough?). This allowed you to view your sync your calendar, contacts and emails to your PlayBook. Of course most people just check their email on their smartphones or their PCs, so it really wasnât the most applauded feature. But this time RIMâs got something else up their sleeve.
Thanks to OS 2.0, this symbiotic connection of a BlackBerry smartphone and a PlayBook with BlackBerry Bridge has been strengthened by something called âOpen Onâ. It allows you to open up an image from your smartphone on your PlayBook. Itâs easy to use and integrated into the standard BlackBerry contextual menu. With an image opened up on the smartphone, you can select âOpen on (insert your PlayBookâs name here)â, youâll see the image show up on the Playbook.
This is a neat feature, which although isnât going to sell millions more PlayBooks, is impressive and immediately will put a smile on the owner of any PlayBook/BlackBerry user. It can a little slow to open some pictures, taking up to a few seconds sometimes (almost an eternity in mobile tech). There are also a few details which I feel are worthwhile to mention. Like when you open a picture on the PlayBook, your BlackBerry goes automatically into âremote modeâ. This is useful in presentations when you just showing the picture on the Playbook and not really use it. You can zoom into the picture by double tapping on your phone, yet you canât navigate around the image unless you zoom out again. I canât help but think that anyone testing out this feature, like me, has tried (and failed) to use pinch-to-zoom to navigate an image. The ability to pan and zoom around the image using two fingers is something Iâll be crossing my fingers for. Of course if youâre using your PlayBook, you can pinch-to-zoom all you want, you just canât do it from the remote function.
I had about a few moments where Iâve used âOpen Onâ too! Thought experiment: Picture you lying on a couch and youâve succumbed to a severe case of laziness, yet you want to show a picture on your phone to someone who is more than two feet away. Now you can just open the picture on the PlayBook and they can pick up the PlayBook. Itâs a win-win situation: you donât have to move, and they can see the picture on a beautiful screen.
But thatâs not all (infomercial-style)! This is where it gets useful; it even works in the Browser! Just navigate to any page on the browser of your BlackBerry smartphone, and select âView on â¦â, and youâll see browsing on your tablet in no time. You can even hold down on a link to bring up the action menu, and select âOpen Link onâ¦.â to open the link on the PlayBook. In about a second, your PlayBook will magically open the browser and open that web page, giving you that ultimate browsing experience whether youâre controlling the PlayBook from the couch, auditorium or in your hands.
This is convenience at its finest. When browsing on a sub-4â screen starts to get frustrating, just open it on the PlayBook and youâre good to go! You donât have to save the link, send it to yourself, and re-open it on another tablet just to switch the web browsing experience. Plus, itâs a great way to share the link with another person without anyone moving or sharing the same small screen like a chump.
I love it. Plain and simple. Itâs simple and effective. This is the kind of feature that makes me wonder how other companies didnât think of it first. But then it hits me. Itâs the kind of feature that youâd never think of until you need it. Just today, when I started thinking to myself ,âMan, reading this article on this Torch is getting lameâ¦what if I could use my PlayBâ¦â. And thereâs the lightbulb. I didnât have to weigh out the options if it was worth it to fire up the PlayBook and find the article again or not. In a second, I was back on the PlayBook reading the fanboi comments. You canât really hate a feature like this, as itâs so simple and it works well, although some developments with the BlackBerry remote function would definitely help!
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