Walt Mossberg at The Wall Street Journal:

The screen is beau­ti­ful, even though it has a lower res­o­lu­tion than the iPad’s. And the cam­eras are bet­ter than the iPad’s.

Resolution. Marketing folks sure botched this one. Here’s what it means accord­ing to Webster:

6 b : a mea­sure of the sharp­ness of an image or of the fine­ness with which a device (as a video dis­play, printer, or scan­ner) can pro­duce or record such an image usu­ally expressed as the total num­ber or den­sity of pix­els in the image

In other words, the term res­o­lu­tion does not refer to a for­mat like 1024×600, but instead to some­thing like 169 pix­els per inch. Resolution is a term to describe den­sity. So. The PlayBook has a res­o­lu­tion of 169 ppi; the iPad 132. The PlayBook has a higher res­o­lu­tion than the iPad. It should instead read:

The screen is beau­ti­ful, partly due to a higher res­o­lu­tion than the iPad’s.

I think we all know this: just because a camera’s image sen­sor has more pix­els does not nec­es­sar­ily mean it pro­duces pho­tographs with bet­ter qual­ity. Though the iPad takes some crummy stills, it does a fine job of cap­tur­ing 720p video out back. There’s also the expe­ri­ence of cap­tur­ing videos. I’ve used smart­phones that cap­ture 1080p HD video, but because of lag the expe­ri­ence was ter­ri­ble. I’d like to know if cap­tur­ing video on the PlayBook is lag-free and enjoy­able, like on the iPad.