Do you remember when Tonium set some parts of DJ world on fire with their revolutionary Pacemaker handheld controller? And do you also remember feeling so gutted for them when the iPhone and iPad essentially pulled the rug from underneath their best laid and well crafted plans? Thus the hardware disappeared off to the ever-growing digital DJ museum in the sky. But it turns out that the ghost of Tonium past lives on in the Pacemaker app. For BlackBerry Playbook. Yeah I know.
This video explains a little more:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se0_MX3ypoQ
It does look slick, and very much in the style of the old hardware, and seems to have everything a fledgling digital DJ would expect to see from a modern DJ app, but done in the inimitable style of the Pacemaker. But given the utter domination of Apple’s iOS domination for smartphones and tablets, why on earth has this been made for the substantially less popular PlayBook platform?
Some digging shows that the Playbook has around 3% of the overall tablet market, and has sold a little over a million units. On first look, targeting your DJ app at the smallest sector of the market may seem crazy, but when you consider that nobody else is likely to be developing for that market, it’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel – a captive audience of DJs who picked up a Playbook cheap and now want an app.
I’m not a programmer anymore so don’t know the complexities of porting QNX to iOS, but there is a degree of sense in developing for a minor platform, taking the cash from that captive audience to hone the product and then taking it to the wider audience. Given that iOS already has its fair share of good and bad apps,making sure that this Pacemaker app has a fighting chance makes a lot of sense. And they already have an established and strong brand in the DJ scene too.
While I might consider grabbing a Google Nexus 7 for Android app testing, I won’t be picking up a Playbook to review the only DJ app on the platform. This beggars the question – how many of you own a BlackBerry Playbook?
Pacemaker is available now at the BlackBerry app store for $19.99.