The PlayBook runs Android apps perfectly fine

I’m delighted that Myriam over at Engadget was thinking straight during this morning’s keynote at BlackBerry World. I was too engrossed in watching what was going on to think, ‘Oh, you know what, I should be videoing this.’

Thankfully Myriam did.

This is a video of the Android segment of the keynote. The RIM team did a live demonstration of Android applications working on the PlayBook. They were at pains to point out that they simply took the binaries and ‘played’ them using the PlayBook’s Android player feature. They didn’t have to do any recompiling.

Everything in the demonstration worked perfectly. To my mind, I was satisfied that Android apps work fine on the PlayBook. You can even find them on the PlayBook’s App World app store! I understand that the functionality will be made available at some point in the future. This is certainly sure to make things rather appealing for developers that have already put in a lot of work developing apps for Android tablets.

The PlayBook gestures have been mapped to the familiar Android controls that you expect — although one of the questions posed on Twitter was: Can Android apps access the PlayBook’s internal resources? (e.g. address book, photo library and so on). I will find out.

Meanwhile here’s Myriam’s video of the Android segment: