The BlackBerry PlayBook launched yesterday with little more than a home screen shortcut to the Facebook web page. Though admittedly, Facebook renders pretty nicely on RIM’s first tablet, a real app is what we’re waiting, and by the looks of this demo from Adobe, it’s not far off. Adobe was showing off a bunch of apps made with Flash tools, and one of them includes Facebook, complete with access to chat, messages, news feeds, photos and friend requests.
The BlackBerry PlayBook runs a brand new operating system powered by QNX Neutrino, so anything that was previously available on RIM’s smartphones need to be rewritten or ported over with common tools. Adobe is very tight with RIM, having provided AIR tools fairly early on in the tablet’s prelaunch period. If RIM used anything by Adobe to make the original Facebook for BlackBerry, then the trip to the PlayBook would have been relatively easy.
The real clincher for me with Facebook on the PlayBook will be if notifications will be in place, and if they’ll feed into the native messages app, be it standalone later on or through Bridge. I’d love to see similar tie-ins that Facebook already provides with their BlackBerry smartphone app, like linking to contacts in the native address book, or enabling easy photo sharing from the camera app. One can only hope that the other web shortcuts that came preloaded on the PlayBook, like Twitter, Gmail, Windows Live Mail, AOL Mail, and Yahoo! Mail will also get proper applications of their own. Of course, we don’t know how long we’ll have to wait for Facebook on the PlayBook to come out, nevermind any of the others; RIM may very well pump out a few more features before launch. Anything else you guys would like to see?
[via BlackBacerryIn]