I find it really annoying how so many people are now praising 7" as the ideal tablet size when Google puts one out, but when RIM did it a year and a half ago, everyone said it was too small. Us playbook owners have been saying this for over a year, but people are too caught up in the destroy RIM bandwagon to be open minded.
I'm sure the same people that were dismissive of the Playbook are also dismissive of the Nexus 7, at least until Apple releases a 7" iPad. That said, the bigger complaints I heard about the Playbook had nothing to do with its size and everything to do with the Blackberry ecosystem as a whole.
It's exact same thing that happened when the mainstream found out about iOS 5's notification system - there was a big hullabaloo about how revolutionary it was, despite it having been present in Android in a more complete form for almost 3 years.
It's probably going to happen again with turn-by-turn navigation when iOS 6 is released.
I got a PlayBook from one of the giveaways. I was really looking forward to the form factor for two things: Skyping and giving it to the gf for reading Facebook. But if your Facebook app is slower than the HTML5-based, universally hated Facebook App on an iPad 1 on iOS5, then you deservedly lose. The only video calling app is limited to PlayBook-to-PlayBook, or maybe RIM-to-RIM. A bad ecosystem is one thing, but builtin apps must be useful.
i got a playbook. i tried to use it. i found the OS very frustrating. we put it in our reception area at USV and 9 out of ten people (and these are tech types for the most part) couldn't figure out how to use it.
