Addressing the BlackBerry PlayBook screen time-out issue

As you all know, the BlackBerry PlayBook was issued an update not that long ago. It brought about somenice changes and included an updated version of Facebook for BlackBerry PlayBook but it left out of simple thing -- that for some folks is a rather large issue. No, not native email and BBM but rather the screen time-out issue when viewing things in the browser. You see, if you are doing something within the BackBerry browser such as watching a video for example -- the maximum time allotted before the screen will time out and go black is 5-minutes.

This timing out of the screen causes whatever it is you are doing in the browser to come to a dead stop. Watching a video? It'll stop playing. Listening to music? It'll stop playing. Even if you are say reading one of Kevin's long winded reviews, if you don't touch the screen in 5-minutes it'll go black and you'll need to force a "waking" up of your PlayBook. The rather odd thing is that it doesn't time out on all things. Some videos keep it awake while others it will time out on. Some audio it will shut down, while other audio will keep on running through the browser.

There are workarounds for this issue in the meantime, such as downloading certain apps from BlackBerry App World  (more info on this in the forum links below) that keep the screen active, but really we shouldn't have to make use of a workaround for this particular problem. Ideally, it would be built into the OS that when the browser is open and active it wouldn't disable and go into standby mode. But as it stands now, this isn't the case. So, sound off in the comments if you're concerned about this and want it fixed -- hopefully RIM will take notice and correct it in a later update.

Discuss more in the CrackBerry Forums - here and here