I’m one of those few and optimistic people that own a BlackBerry Playbook. I’ve updated it to OS version 2.0 twice and gone back to the current 1.x release. I’ve also side-load some adapted Android apps, some work and some do not.
This week after side-loading some Android apps that are supposed to work, I thought I’d try to use the suggestion on many forums to do a Security Wipe to see if that helps. Unfortunately many of these helpful tips are misleading. A little known fact exists in this scenario of doing a Security Wipe on the beta developer version of OS 2.0. They don’t include the default apps in this OS version. The default apps are a remnant of the original OS install. So doing a Security Wipe will leave you with only 2 apps, Browser and Setup. And the only way I know to get apps from the app store onto the Playbook is to use the App World app.
After doing the Security Wipe (and some research) and discovering that you loose all your apps at this point on pre-release 2.0, I found it also killed the Wi-Fi ability. No local Wi-Fi network would get listed after the wipe on OS 2.0, and it would search endlessly without timing out.
Connecting the Playbook to USB on a Windows computer and opening BlackBerry Desktop, it will immediately ask if it should upgrade the device to (in my case) version 1.8.x. Doing so downgrades the OS and restores all the default apps and it also fixed the Wi-Fi discovery problem.
The Pre-release OS 2.0 works pretty well, and I like it much better than 1.8.x, but it does come with it’s issues. And in this case, DO NOT do a Security Wipe on the developer version of OS 2.0, unless you also intend to downgrade the OS or do a restore right after.