Apple CEO Steve Jobs put in an unusual appearance Monday evening on an Apple sales call — using the opportunity to trash the iPad’s main rivals. Jobs, who has not addressed investors on an earnings call for two years, lashed out at competitors Google and Blackberry-maker Research in Motion, and dismissed the smaller tablets made by rivals including Samsung and Dell. “The current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA, dead on arrival,” Jobs told analysts on the conference call. “Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small.” Jobs noted that Apple’s iPhone outsold RIM’s BlackBerry in its most recent quarter. “I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future,” he said. And he criticized Google’s Android as a “fragmented” operating system. RIM and Google did not respond to requests for comment, but Google’s head of Android development Andy Rubin responded in true geek fashion — on Twitter. The developer used his 140 characters to refute Jobs’ contention that Android is not an open platform, showing how easy it is to download and modify it. @TatWza