The Blackberry Bridge - Every tablet should have one

I am an avid blackberry user and watched with interest over the last year as the Playbook drama unfolded in the media.  Every new thing I heard about the playbook delighted me but seemed to cause many negative comments (mostly it seemed from people who have never picked up a blackberry).  Horrors! No native email, no BBM, no BES, only Wi-Fi, 7 " screen and, worst of all, the blackberry bridge (commentators droned on and on that they did not understand what it was).  I guess they did not understand blackberry users.  For me the size was great and all the other things that were not in the first release were irrelevant because of the Blackberry Bridge. Particularly the lack of a 3g/4g model, the last thing I want is yet another network subscription with monthly payments.

At the time, I had 10 email accounts on my bb, I used BBM, all my data and PIMs were synchronized and backed up wirelessly with my blackberry.  Why on earth would I want to add yet another device and have to manage all my data I asked myself.  The blackberry bridge is the ideal solution I figured.  Within a few minutes of finishing the initialization of my Playbook, I had full access to all my email accounts, contacts, calendar, my BBM account, it was amazing! 

The Blackberry Bridge connects your playbook and blackberry phone together via Bluetooth.   When your is connected, you have 8 new apps on your playbook:  Messages, Contacts, BridgeBrowser, Calendar, BBM, MemoPad, Tasks, BridgeFiles.  I was expecting something like a remote desktop window into my blackberry apps, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that these are in fact new apps running on your playbook but operating on your blackberry data. 

There were also a few other pleasant surprises with the Blackberry Bridge:

1)     All the wifi profiles on my BB were transferred to my playbook.  Real nice, saving me the trouble of having to retype all of the keys into the playbook.

2)     The Blackberry Bridge is multi blackberry capable.  By this I means that you can bridge more than one phone to a playbook, only one at a time, but the profiles remain on the playbook.  In our house both my wife and I have blackberry phones.  We have one playbook, which generally sits in its stand on the coffee table (our phones are often on their stands on our respective desks).  When an email comes in either one of us can pick up the playbook and with one button, the playbook is completely personalized for either one of us. 

3)     The bridged apps and the blackberry phone apps can run simultaneously and independently.  This can be handy, especially when I’m composing a new email and want to check some information from another email.

Here are a few other things about the Blackberry Bridge:

1)     When connected, you are notified on the playbook of incoming messages on the connected blackberry with both visual and sound alerts, you can also go directly to the bridge app from the notice

2)     The Blackberry bridge seems to have no noticeable effect on battery usage

3)     You cannot cut and paste from bridged apps, I suspect this is for security reasons

4)     When you disconnect your blackberry from the playbook, none of your data is left on the playbook(at least as far as I can tell)

All in all, I think the Blackberry bridge is a fantastic capability.  I would like to see more bridged app, for example all the native IM apps like Yahoo, Live, Google talk etc.  In my opinion, this is a capability that every tablet should have.