As though tearing a page out of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe or Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, RIM is running up a tablet called BlackPad that calls to mind the archetypal medieval wild card, the black knight.

RIM means to use the embedded Neutrino operating system, a species of Unix, from fellow Canadian QNX Software Systems that it bought for $200 million in April and combine it with widgetry from the U.S. Army's QNX-powered unmanned Crusher tank developed by Carnegie Mellon four years ago.

At least that's the story Bloomberg tells quoting anonymous sources unauthorized to whisper the secret.

RIM bought the rights to blackpad.com in July according to Whois.

BlackPad is supposed to be heavy on BlackBerry-style e-mail protected by BlackBerry security. It will include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity to the Internet but it won't connect directly to the cell network the way some iPads can, the wire service said.

The thing should be roughly the same size as Apple's iPad and come out in November.