RIM BlackBerry PlayBook

Attractively designed, the 14.4-ounce, 5.1-by-7.6-by-0.4-inch BlackBerry PlayBook features a black frame and contour and feels comfortable in hand.

The back panel features the BlackBerry logo and houses a 5-megapixel camera—far higher resolution than the rear-facing lens on the iPad 2, but comparable to the Motorola Xoom's rear camera.

The BlackBerry Tablet OS has some visual elements in common with BlackBerry 6, such as the bar of app folders floating above the main app icons.

The PlayBook is much smaller than either the Xoom or the iPad 2, since its screen is only 7 inches instead of the iPad's 9.7 and the Xoom's 10.1.

Its 7-inch screen has a resolution of 1024 by 600 pixels, which is lower than the iPad 2's 9.7-inch touch-screen LCD, but since it's a smaller display, it actually seems sharper.

The bottom panel houses a mini HDMI output, a mini USB connector, and a magnetic charging port similar to those on Apple's MacBooks (it works with an optional dock accessory, but the included charging/sync cable is mini USB).

The headphone jack is up on the top panel along with Volume controls and the Power button. Internal stereo speakers project sound through thin slits on either side of the display—they can get quite loud for a modestly sized device.

From its multitasking abilities to extra features like video chat to quality of apps, the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook is bested by both the iPad 2 and the Xoom.

As for processing tests, there aren't many available in App World, but the PlayBook seems generally fast, though the aforementioned issue with having too may apps open at once tells us that the processor probably could have been better designed to handle current tasks and shelf others in the background, as the iPad 2 and Xoom do effectively.

Internally, the PlayBook is armed with a new Texas Instruments processor. The OMAP4430 is a dual-core, 1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 chip, like the Nvidia Tegra 2 found in the Motorola Xoom.

The user interface for the PlayBook is quite impressive. Not only does it run smoothly, but the graphics are simple and visually interesting.

The BlackBerry Tablet OS manages multitasking a little bit like HP's WebOS, by reducing running apps into miniaturized thumbnails you can flick forward and back through.

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Some of the "apps" that the Tablet OS comes with are just Web links, like all those email icons - they just open mobile optimized versions of popular Webmail sites.

The BlackBerry Tablet OS's WebKit-powered browser is excellent, including full Flash support. This tablet-centric Gmail site looks pretty slick, but it isn't enough to make you forget the lack of a real email app.

The photo gallery app on the BlackBerry Tablet OS, like many of the other built-in apps, was designed by Swedish firm TAT.

Here's the music player. The BlackBerry Tablet OS syncs music files with PCs via RIM's BlackBerry Desktop software, which can sync over your iTunes playlists.

You can play songs right from this song list, or jump into a full-screen view.

Here's the full screen view of the music player, with nice-looking album art.

The video gallery gives you file names and thumbnails. The "downloaded" video tab gives us hope that a movie store is coming soon to join RIM's music store.

HD videos such as this one look great on the BlackBerry PlayBook.

There's a podcast client included with the BlackBerry Tablet OS. It's good looking, but has the usual limited catalog.

Here's App World, RIM's app store for the BlackBerry Tablet OS. There are already 3,000 apps available, according to RIM, but most of them are little Web gadgets.

The category screen in BlackBerry App World. You can currently pay for apps using PayPal or a credit card.

The BlackBerry Tablet OS comes with its own music store; prices are similar to other mainstream digital music stores.

The music store supports not only MP3, but also uncompressed FLAC music, and allows one-minute rather than 30-second previews of songs.

The PDF reader on the BlackBerry Tablet OS works very well - it rendered complex PDFs easily, with smooth zooming and scrolling.

This app from the National Film Board of Canada was one of the best third party apps we could find. But like many of the initial apps, it basically just slices and dices Web videos.

Bing Maps, rather than Google Maps, is the default mapping service on the BlackBerry Tablet OS.

Bing Maps has a dramatic satellite view, but we've found its local search function to be a bit less accurate than Google's.

The default weather app is good-looking and simple.

Microsoft Office document editors from DataViz are a particular strength of the BlackBerry Tablet OS, and it's great to see that they're built in.

The BlackBerry Tablet OS comes with a YouTube app.

BlackBerry Bridge is the mysterious app which would let you get your e-mail and messages from your BlackBerry phone to a tablet, but it wasn't working on our units.

The Tablet OS has several security options, including (yay!) Cisco and Checkpoint VPNs.

You can download your files from the Tablet OS using USB or Wi-Fi sharing.