Lost in Research in Motion’s surprising earnings report Thursday was one particularly dreadful number: Last quarter, RIM shipped just 130,000 of its PlayBook tablets. To put that in perspective, Apple shipped, on average, more iPads than that every day in its most recent quarter (for a total of over 17 million). Amazon and Samsung, while far behind Apple, also had decent tablet shipment numbers.

Before diving into this roundup of alternative iPad browsers, I should mention one small point: There are no alternative iPad browsers! "How can this be, given all the iPad browsers in the App Store?" you ask. The fact is, Apple restricts actual Web page rendering capability to its own Safari mobile browser.

It's time for our weekly roundup of the best mobile games for smartphones and tablets from the last seven days, on the day of the week – Thursday – which has emerged as the key release day for the industry, much as Friday is for console and handhelds.