Following on from co-CEO Jim Balsillie's RIM Responds to Apple's 'Distortion Field' blog post, RIM has stressed its increasingly direct competition with Apple by publicly cosying up to Adobe.

At its MAX conference, RIM's co-CEO Mike Lazaridis demoed the PlayBook 7-inch tablet, which is due in Q1 2011 - running Flash 10.1 within its browser - something that iPad owners will never experience.

Tooled up

Further to its surprise appearance, RIM announced its new SDK would enable developers to create AIR applications for PlayBook using Adobe's standard development tools.

"The BlackBerry PlayBook, with its dual core processor and multi-processing OS, is a multi-tasking powerhouse that is also the world's first tablet to be built from the metal up to run Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR applications in a fully integrated, fully optimised fashion," said David Yach, RIM's CTO.

"The new SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook unleashes a wealth of opportunity for the Adobe and BlackBerry development communities to easily create value added applications and experiences for customers and we are extremely excited by the positive feedback received from developers in early trials."

AIR now, native later

The new SDK enables the easy porting of existing Adobe AIR apps, the display of HTML and Flash content, and the hardware accelerated playback of video and graphics intensive content, within the browser and AIR applications, up to 1080p HD content.

The tool will also be backed by the future release of the BlackBerry Tablet OS native SDK.

The BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR and the BlackBerry PlayBook simulator are both available in beta form and can be downloaded for free from www.blackberry.com/developers/tabletos.