iFixIt Tears Down The BlackBerry PlayBook

Given its execrable reception and terrible performance, you’d expect an RIM BlackBerry Playbook — viscera spilled across a white room table — to contain nothing but 400 grams of dirty sand and several old marbles and rusty jacks.

But no! The boys over at iFixIt split the PlayBook open, and found a circuit board, a touch panel and some big batteries inside. Who’d a thunk?

I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty troubling. It was hard enough to accept the PlayBook’s woeful deficiencies (including features as simple as native email, contacts or calendar) under the assumption that it had no silicon at all inside, and was, in fact, some sort of glorified ant farm sold at a premium to unsuspecting suckers. That there’s actual hardware inside makes its deficiencies inexcusable, especially when that hardware is virtually identical to that of the iPad 2.

One thing I love about tablet breakdowns is the way they just casually reveal exactly which technology has become super-efficient, and which technology still has a long way to go. That tablets like the PlayBook and iPad 2 are essentially just huge batteries with a single tiny, index-card sized circuit board attach really show you how far CPUs have come in thirty years… and how much battery technology still has to go.

John Brownlee

John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.