When BlackBerry announced its business class tablet called the PlayBook, one of the stand-out points was the shear power the little 7″ device was supposed to be packing. I say supposed, as nobody had actually seen one up close and personal. Until now.

Over on BlackBerry’s YouTube channel, there’s an interesting video comparing the PlayBook’s webpage rendering speed and accuracy with that of Apple’s iPad. Various sites are tested, and both machines have had their caches cleared beforehand. The results are quite stunning.

In all speed tests, the little tablet could outpace the iPad pretty comprehensively, with pages nearly completing their loading on the PlayBook before the iPad has really gotten going. But that’s not the only test the video shows. Next up, BlackBerry show off how the adidas.com website displays on both tablets, with the PlayBook loading a fully Flash-enabled page with the iPad kicking out an error, along with a poorly formatted web 1.0-looking affair. Interesting stuff indeed.

To really drive the point home, the web standards’ ACID3 test is also performed. Perhaps predictably by this point, the iPad once again comes in 2nd, with the test not displaying 100% pixel perfect rendering. PlayBook suffers no such problems.

So what is the reason behind the stellar performance from PlayBook? Well, there’s that 1GHz dual-core CPU for starters, and when married to the 1GB of onboard RAM, the hardware performance of BlackBerry’s answer to the iPad and Galaxy Tab really could be the hardware platform of choice for more CPU-intensive apps and users.

So there we have it. Finally some real hands-on video of real-world use of the BlackBerry PlayBook, even if it is in the hands of a BlackBerry engineer.

Time for iPad 2 methinks!

BlackBerry PlayBook and iPad Comparison: Web Fidelity