Over the past two years, RIM has been left in the dust by Apple and Google in the smartphone space, and RIM's first crack at a tablet device doesn't arrive until sometime in 2011. Despite the wait for the arrival of the PlayBook, RIM is trying to generate interest in an attempt to get consumers to forgo the iPad this Christmas and wait for its new toy instead. One of the numerous complaints about recent BlackBerries like the Storm and Torch is slow performance, so RIM has released a new video to show that the PlayBook can give the iPad a real run for its money.

A developer from the browser group at RIM shows off the rendering speed of the PlayBook and iPad side by side, and the PlayBook certainly looks promising. Rather than a derivative of the classic BlackBerry OS, the PlayBook is running on QNX, and, like the iPad, the browser is powered by the WebKit rendering engine. Whenever a company produces a demonstration like this, it will obviously choose sites that show its hardware and software in the best possible light. Nonetheless, the PlayBook appears to load and render pages significantly faster than its Apple counterpart. The PlayBook also did a good job of playing back Flash content from Adidas.com, which the iPad obviously can't do. Both devices scored 100 on the ACID 3 compatibility test, but only the iPad showed some rendering artifacts.

If the rest of the PlayBook works as well as the browser, it may yet have potential. Click "Read More" to check out the video itself and see how each device fared in RIM's test.