With Apple’s iPhone and Google’s smartphones taking away market share from BlackBerrys, RIM was forced to develop something to fight back. After iPad became an overnight success and with Samsung set to debut an Android-powered tablet, dubbed the Galaxy Tab, RIM was not about to be outdone.

Last week, RIM announced that they will be releasing their own 7-inch tablet, called the BlackBerry PlayBook. Expected to arrive in early 2011, the PlayBook will weigh less than a pound and will measure less than a centimeter in thickness. It will be powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor with 1GB of onboard memory, four times more than the iPad. It will also be equipped with a pair of cameras (5-megapixel camera in the back, 3 MP camera in the front), both capable of recording HD video. It will also be able to output 1080p video via HDMI.

The PlayBook will run on a new tablet operating system designed by QNX Software Systems, which RIM acquired earlier this year. It will support multitasking and Flash, as well as multimedia-friendly HTML5 Web standards. The first version will feature Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support and will later versions plan to feature both 3G and 4G connections.

The PlayBook will also allow for connecting to a nearby BlackBerry phone via Bluetooth for viewing e-mails, calendars, and contacts, which likely means you’ll be able to draft emails on the PlayBook and then fire them off from your Blackberry phone. As RIM puts it, the PlayBook is a BlackBerry “amplified.”