There was some speculation and now it's finally here. RIM just announced the BlackBerry PlayBook, the first every BlackBerry tablet device to compete with the Samsung Galaxy Tab and of course, the Apple iPad. It's a sleek and slim tablet running its own custom-designed Playbook OS which somewhat can resemble BlackBerry OS 6. It has an HD front-facing and rear-facing camera. On the inside is a 1GHz Cortex-A9 processor with 1GB of RAM and on the outside is a 7 inch widescreen multi-touch display.

It features multitasking support, an HDMI port, USB, 1080p HD video, and more. Plus it's got all the latest web standards built in along with Adobe Flash 10.1. RIM also announced a brand new way for developers to create apps called WebWorks. This enables apps to be created much faster. There's no Java skill required at all, just HTML and other web standards.

No pricing has been mentioned at all and only the very vague release date of early 2011 was mentioned.