With the iPad 2 released to the market as of April 19^th RIM has decided to make certain their offering remains price competitive so they’re releasing their Playbook tablet at a similar price: $499. According to an article published on the Gadgetwise blog of the New York Times, this will make the Playbook the first tablet price competitive with the iPad 2 to reach the market—both the Motorola Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab currently cost more than the iPad 2.

A solid reply to take on Apple’s new tablet flagship, especially after the extreme fanfare during the iPad 2’s release and ultimately the emergence of other tablets designed to compete with the iPad series. The Playbook is priced to sell and that’s what’s going to put it on the map.

RIM mentioned that they intend to hit the market with a bare-bones model that can only access the Internet via Wi-Fi hotspots; but that more sophisticated models, which could connect via wireless carriers, would not be available until later this year. Taking a very similar tack to Apple, RIM will be offering memory upgrade models to their base at $100 dollar increments for geometric increases: $599 for the 32-gigabyte version, and $699 for the 64-gigabyte version.

The similarity between the platforms, however, disappears there as the iPad proceeds with a larger screen and the iPad series—like all Apple devices—shuns Adobe Flash, where the Playbook suffers no such disadvantage. It’s also been mentioned that while the iPad 2 supports a twin pair of cameras for augmented display and video teleconferencing, the Playbook sports a superior resolution camera.

After its debut at CES 2011, the Playbook has set itself up like a powerful competitor for similar tablets and with this price it may just be aiming to topple iPad’s dominance. Along with the QNX OS on the device that could hook it into the Android Marketplace and give developers a whole new playground, it would have a ready-made developer community to tap into. This not only means that developers would have a larger space to move around in; but it means that consumers buying into the Playbook would have the best of both worlds from RIM and Android capabilities—something that even the iPad 2 doesn’t currently boast.

For those who want to get ahead of the game, Best Buy has begun offering advance orders of the Playbook on their website.