RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie has hit out at Apple’s emphasis on making the mobile internet accessible via apps and has argued instead for his own company’s browser-based approach, in the latest instance of the war of words between the two companies. Balsillie also criticised Apple’s development environment for being less open than RIM’s. “We believe that you can bring the mobile to the Web but you don’t need to go through some kind of control point of an SDK, and that’s the core part of our message,” Balsillie told the Web 2.0 Summit, according to an eWeek article. “You don’t need an app for the web” or to use a special defined set of development tools, eWeek reported Balsillie as stating. Asked by the summit host John Battelle whether he rejected “appification” of the web, Balsillie replied “correct”.

RIM has also released a YouTube video that measures the performance of its Playbook tablet, which is due to launch early next year, against Apple’s iPad. The video shows the Playbook running some applications three to four times quicker than its rival. The tit-for-tat between the two companies has been in full swing since last month when Apple CEO Steve Jobs used a quarterly earnings call to claim that Apple has taken over from RIM as the main competitor to Android and that RIM’s new BlackBerry 6 operating system faces a struggle. Jobs also criticised iPad pretenders like RIM’s PlayBook, which is expected to launch early next year, for their smaller screen sizes. In response, RIM’s Balsillie used a blog to accuse Apple of creating a “distortion field” and using misleading sales figures.  “Customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple” ran the blog. Balsillie also criticised Apple’s refusal to support Adobe’s Flash.