The entire bezel is touch sensitive and can be used to swipe between apps and bring up menus.
The virtual keyboard and screen are multitouch. You can also get the keyboard in both landscape and portrait.
There are swipe gestures galore.
While the event is an Adobe event meant for developers, a lot of media have been showing up to take a look at the device. Even though they’ll tell you they got a “hands-on”, it looks like RIM isn’t letting anyone play around with it too much as the device isn’t ready for consumption. It would be cool to hear more about the APIs and features that will be available to developers. We’ll try and get you those details soon.
Ryan Stewart is a developer evangelist for Adobe and he recently put together a screencast for the beginning steps to creating BlackBerry PlayBook apps. The video runs you through setting up Flash Builder Burrito and the PlayBook simulator, so if you’re more of a visual learner, this video should really help. RIM ran us through these steps during the developer webcasts, but in case you’re just tuning in now, you may appreciate this video.
The third BlackBerry PlayBook developer webcast will be broadcasted at 2PM EST or 11AM PST. In this webcast, you can learn about how to integrate your app with the PlayBook tablet using the Adobe AIR 2.5 APIs and the BlackBerry Tablet OS APIs. Other topics included in the webcast are:
Adobe AIR 2.5 device integration APIs
BlackBerry Tablet OS device integration APIs
Testing and Debugging your application BlackBerry Tablet Simulator
Live Q&A with experts from Research In Motion Limited and Adobe
The next BlackBerry PlayBook webcast where RIM and Adobe will be demonstrating the SDK will be held on November 11th. The first webcast was helpful but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, so hopefully RIM has taken the time to plan out a little more about what features will be available to developers and give us a better idea of the roadmap. Remember, a lot of what they build into the feature roadmap will be based on demand so openly voice your support for certain features.
At the BlackBerry Developer Group in Ottawa, Anthony Rizk demonstrated how easy it is to create an app for the PlayBook using the Adobe AIR SDK. Zeebu has posted a video of Zeebu’s Baby GO running on the BlackBerry PlayBook simulator. According to Anthony, this took about 4 hours of work, including time figuring out the tools and packaging the output from Flash Professional CS5. The app also plays audio, but unfortunately they couldn’t get audio output working in the simulator.
