Research In Motion (RIM) has unveiled their answer to Apple’s iPad; The BlackBerry Playbook.  Touted as the first enterprise ready professional tablet, RIM has pulled out all the stops to truly give the iPad and the tablet market a good shakeup.  The BlackBerry PlayBook, on paper, looks like the beefier tablet when compared to the iPad and current Android tablets, touting a 1ghz dual-core processor, and an impressive 1gb of RAM for true multitasking.

Taking a similar approach from Apple, RIM has decided to make use of a new tablet specific OS for the PlayBoook, offering a unique tablet centered experience.  The BlackBerry PlayBook will clock in at a little over 7 inches in length, making it smaller than the iPad 9 inch size.  However, the screen does boast a 1024×600 screen , meaning a deeper resolution and less pixelation when reading text.

It is on track for a 2011 release, and don’t be surprised if it is offered on multiple carriers (Verizon, ATT, etc) similar to their current phone offerings.

Check out the full specs:

After all the hype last week of Apple’s coming iPad, Google wasted no time in getting mock-ups of a Chrome based tablet.  Now, there has not been an official announcement of the when, the what, or the how, but one thing is certain, Google is taking aim right at Cupertino with these pictures.  One thing to remember, unlike the iPad, a possible Google tablet could come on multiple devices, meaning more variety on hardware for the consumer.

Keyboard interaction with the screen: anchored, split, attached to focus.

Launchers as an overlay, providing touch or search as means to access web sites.

Contextual actions triggered via dwell.

Zooming UI for multiple tabs

Tabs presented along the side of the screen (see Side tabs)

Creating multiple browsers on screen using a launcher

– Google Chromium Project