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DingleBerry for PlayBook, oh my

I was amused by a brief story on the Blackberry PlayBook that crossed the wires yesterday. An…

I was amused by a brief story on the Blackberry PlayBook that crossed the wires yesterday.
An editor colleague here forwarded it to me, knowing I would get a kick out of it.
It was from Bloomberg News: “RIM Investigating Report of PlayBook ‘JailBreak’ by Hackers”
Seems the folks from Research In Motion Ltd. (makers of the PlayBook) were irritated yesterday that someone was tinkering with their product.
Reporter Hugo Miller wrote that the company is “investigating assertions that hackers have been able to ‘jailbreak’ its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer and access unauthorized applications, and will fix the problem if true.”
In RIM’s prepared statement on the matter was this:
“RIM will develop and release a software update to minimize adverse impact to our customers.”

My take

The hackers are a sophisticated handful of guys.
I’m of the opinion they should be referred to as white hat crackers though.
They are doing this probably just for the glory of it (like climbing a mountain, because it is there and they can) but not with malicious intent.
[Read up on the old hacker/cracker/black hat cracker controversy by visiting the link above — it is fascinating stuff.]
No, despite picking an obnoxious name (yep, some are calling it juvenile) for the ‘DingleBerry’ ‘tool/project, methinks it might end up offering a longer life to the PlayBook.
Certainly it will mean more choice in terms of applications for those folks that have bought a PlayBook than RIM thus far has.
What do I mean by that?
It goes back to the inept way in which RIM marketed the PlayBook in the first place: Going head to head with Apple and the iPad in the consumer market instead of the business market where they already had a great many advantages (primarily a massive installed base of Blackberry Enterprise Server, but I digress).
I do not have the numbers in front of me but the Blackberry PlayBook app market is miniscule compared to that of the Android market place.
So the white hat crackers with the DingleBerry tool they are developing (it seems to be working but not yet released) want to allow others to be able to boot up the PlayBook in some other operating system environment.
The hope, based on their video, seems to be to in turn recruit others to port some flavor of the Android tablet operating system onto the PlayBook.
That would give the million or so owners of PlayBooks access to potentially hundreds of thousands of Android apps instead of the mere tens of thousands they have access to on RIM’s native application market for the PlayBook.
That said, only a tiny minority of PlayBook owners would likely be up to the task of carrying though on this and fewer still with the impetus to try — you won’t be able to call on RIM for support if you wreck your PlayBook after all.
Here is a fun, lively post on Engadget, with the YouTube video from the hackers embedded in it.
Enjoy.