OPINION: PLAYBOOK IS STILL A GOOD BUY IN 2017?

I have a confession to make. Well, more of an observation about myself, really. Make of it what you will.

I like to shop online. A lot. I shop for cars, phones, vinyl, electronics, houses, music, phones, and much more at all my favorite places - eBay, Swappa, craigslist, and of course, Amazon. Most of the time I just like to browse and see what's out there. Sometimes, if I'm looking for something specific, I will just lurk for days and weeks and months until the price falls to a point where I'm comfortable taking the risk. Especially with electronics, that's the trade-off we all have to make - we can be early adopters and pay top dollar for the latest & greatest; we could wait for a good sale and get something slightly outdated, or we can wait for that fire sale or clearance, when the thing you really want is dirt cheap, but now behind the terms. It's really more of a continuum than anything, a sliding scale of value, if you will.

I don't have to go over all the specs with you, but for a quick refresher, it had a 1024×600 display, front and rear cameras (w/ 1080p), sensors aplenty, and BlackBerry Tablet OS, all powered by a dual-core OMAP4430 or OMAMP4460 processor. Crucially, it included support for Flash. For a 2011 tablet, this was a decent list. Unfortunately, most people didn't understand that the PlayBook was intended to be paired with a BlackBerry as a companion device, so many people saw it is an incomplete, half-finished tablet that pushed to market before it was ready.

All of that brings me to today's post - the stillborn BlackBerry PlayBook. I remember when this thing launched in 2011; I wasn't in line for it (there were no lines), but I did go to my local Best Buy and try it out for about 10 minutes. I remember being confused about what it did, because the rep knew nothing about it except that it had a few good driving games on it. I liked it, but not enough to pay $400. I guess most people agreed with me. As the years have gone by, I've had the pleasure of owning a Surface and a Kindle, but I've never owned a PlayBook. I've never used Bridge, and I've never had the perfect companion to my trusty Z10.

I'm staring at a $42 16GB model on Amazon. Would you buy it?