Blackberry Playbook

It's a 7-inch tablet with a 1024x600 screen that weighs 0.9 pounds

Meaning it's smaller and lighter than the iPad, with a more pixel-dense screen (i.e., text is gonna look cleaner and less pixel-y). It's a little bigger and heavier than the Samsung Galaxy Tab, on the other hand. (Then again, the Galaxy Tab looks more like a really big phone.)

It's running BlackBerry Tablet OS

As rumored, the BlackBerry PlayBook isn't running "BlackBerry 6," but the BlackBerry tablet OS, which is "powered by QNX technology." QNX is a software company RIM bought in April, whose software is used in products by Cisco and GE, among others. The OS is built on QNX's Neutrino microkernel.

It supports a whole bunch of standard platforms and technologies, like POSIX OS, SMP, Open GL, BlackBerry 6, WebKit, Java, Adobe Flash and AIR, along with RIM's new BlackBerry WebWorks platform. Apps written for WebWorks will run on BlackBerry 6 or the PlayBook, while Java makes it easier for developers to port Java-based BlackBerry 6 apps. Oh, and OpenGL means there's serious potential for graphically intense games.

It's got a tablet-optimized UI and multitasks out of the gate, unlike the iPad. And unlike Android, it has a nicer interface for navigating through applications, like a cross between webOS's cards and Apple's CoverFlow. It's got an onscreen keyboard for typing. The snippets of App World in the preview video look a lot like what you have on BlackBerry phones, a grid of tiles. The music player looks a bit like the iPod app on the iPad, but skinned in a slate color.

Dual-core 1GHz processor and 1GB RAM

That means it's got the horsepower to multitask, output 1080p video and run high-powered apps. The 1GB of RAM is particularly important for running applications in the background, and opening multiple tabs in the web browser, as iPad owners know from opening more than a few tabs in Safari and watching them get flushed as the iPad runs out of memory.