I can't get into details, but basically I agree with you. The Storm...was a product of many compromises. But it's only the start of a series of decisions that...
I dearly wish someone would explain the whole idea of why Blackberry built the Playbook. It seems like a product that was so forced with such a confusing development story.
Not sure how much I can share without giving myself away but...
As an active participant in Playbook's entire development from (near) start to end, there were multiple reasons. They weren't good reasons (most of my colleagues had, eh, concerns which got override,) but they somewhat made sense.
What happened was that multiple teams (internal and external) screwed up, so much so that the thing's internal was completely redesigned half way through development ie. Switched to a completely different SoC .
As another poster noted, their power supplies were great. I still have a couple left around my house. They had to be great partly because of a design oversight....
To give BB credit, the playbook was a '1st gen' device for that category, it's really only when compared to Apple, an amazing company with so much to leverage, that the Playbook was bad.
If they could have taken more time, it might have been better.
But the Playbook product did effectively expose the lack of depth, talent and relevant experience at RIM. I'm ashamed to say.
I worked with a VAR when that shipped. They gave us some to try and encourage sales. It was a terribly slow device with poor battery life compared to iPad.
I still use the well made power adapter (Micro USB) that came with it to charge devices to this day. Kinda sad seeing that blackberry logo and knowing the tablet was horrible.
I've heard that the Playbook was actually in development before Apple's iPad was announced, and after that it got rushed out. I don't remember where I read this (it was a couple of years ago), so I don't know how accurate that is.
