During this week's Apple iOS 5 announcement, Steve Jobs fired a shot at Research In Motion when he announced Apple's version of BlackBerry Messenger, iMessage. While not as feature rich as good 'ole BBM, it does offer send and read indicators which give it that much-treasured BBM feeling. Rather than delivering the experience in a separate iMessaging application, it's actually baked into the text messaging app, which makes it pretty seamless (if you don't have an iOS device you just get a text message and not an iMessage). 

With some help from Bla1ze on the other end, in the video above me and Rene from TiPb.com compare iMessenger and BlackBerry Messenger in a bit of a head to head shootout. Check it out as we see how the two stack up, both in terms of features and in terms of SPEED. 

Now that Apple has it's own alternative to BlackBerry Messenger, I wonder if this is enough to make RIM go ahead and put out that cross-platform version of BBM that so many of us have been longing for? Sound off in the comments!