Nov 17, 2010 08:56 GMT  ·  By

In an attempt to grab as many customers that are yet to decide on what brand their next tablet will be, RIM has posted a comparison video between its upcoming tablet, the PlayBook, and Apple's iPad (running iOS 3.2.2). Both tablets have been subjected to a full set of tests meant to show the Web browsing experience that the devices are offering to users.

The video starts with a rendering test meant to show how quickly a webpage loads on each of the devices. After clearing out the cache and cookies from both tablets, PlayBook's browser seems to be fairly faster than the Safari browser embedded in the iPad.

One can probably say that the speed test is not that relevant as Apple's iPad uses a 1GHz Cortex A8 processor, while RIM's PlayBook is powered by a 1GHz Cortex A9 processor, which wasn't available when the iPad was launched.

However, the following tests do a better job at suggesting that the PlayBook's browser is definitely offering a much smoother and immersive experience to the user compared to what the iPad can offer at the moment.

The next test (Flash) shows how the PlayBook browser is able to display richer content than the iPad's because it features support for Flash.You can't really compare the two here as the iPad gets an error saying that “Adobe Player is Not Available”.

Apparently, the PlayBook is built to support open Web standards, so developers have the freedom to develop using Flash and HTML5 to deliver true web fidelity. To demonstrate how both tablets are supporting these standards RIM used the ACID 3 test.

While both devices have scored 100 out of 100, the iPad shows a small rendering artifact, which means that it doesn't have perfect pixel rendering in the test. In RIM’s view, this is an indication that the Playbook delivers better rendering and higher fidelity when it comes to real world website browsing.

The final test shows a comparison between the two tablets’ Javascript and HTML5 capabilities. The test is important as the technologies are being used to create rich content such as online games and web apps. The results show that the animation on the PlayBook is smooth and fluid without any freezes or lags, while on the iPad the animation is choppy and very slow.

Check out the original demo video explained by Matthew from RIM: