The Tablet Cometh?
Finally! Although, it’s not exactly promised–but Apple seems to have a big event scheduled for January 26:
The company has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for several days in late January, according to people familiar with the plans.
Apple is expected to use the venue to make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th. Both YBCA and Apple declined to comment.
There’s no guarantee that it’s the tablet, but really, it’s gotta be the tablet. For too long, we have had too much news, too many patents filed, too many leaked bits and pieces, and now a NYT blogger has this:
But the icing on the cake comes from a current senior employee inside Apple. When one of my colleagues here asked if the rumors of the Apple tablet were true, and when we could expect such a device, the response from his source was, “I can’t really say anything, but, let’s just say Steve is extremely happy with the new tablet.”
Yet another recently departed Apple employee tipped me: “You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.” [possible clue to the interactivity here]
Indeed, magazines and newspapers have been hinting, some more outright than others, that they are preparing their content for some kind of tablet, such as might possibly come from Apple. Now we are getting reports that Apple has asked iPhone app developers to supersize their apps, which would mean that the tablet might be another closed system, and could interact with the iPhone. Other rumors suggest that the tablet could deliver multimedia and that, with the Apple TV, Apple could be set to make a move on the cable TV industry, with a cheaper and more flexible TV content distribution model.
Estimates are that the tablet would reach shelves in or soon after March. But before it’s announced (hopefully) about a month from now, expect a storm of rumors and a wide range of stellar expectations. Will it be 3G? Will you have to get a new account or sign on for yet more years of contracts to get it? Will it cost more than $800? What kind of multi-touch gesturing will it have? What kind of battery life? What resolution screen? What CPU? How much RAM? AT&T or Verizon? And so on and so on….
As of Saturday I’m going to direct 100% of my professional energies towards creating launch products for the tablet.
I sat around with my thumb up my nether region these past two years, dithering about iPhone apps, but with the new screensize there will be an entirely new market opened up for apps.
And the bigger screensize really fits what I want to do better than the HVGA of the iPhone platform.
Matthew Yglesias has some thoughts on the tablet:
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/01/the-tablet-hype.php
“…what problem is an Apple tablet supposed to solve?”
He essentially suggests that it could be the worst of the iPhone (less than ideal keyboarding experience) and the laptop (large)… and suggests that the technology might better be integrated into a laptop platform rather than creating yet another device to lug around. I see his point… though I don’t totally agree.
The one area I see it being a success in is textbooks… if it could eliminate the need for my 11 year old to lug around 20 pounds of books everywhere then I’d buy it. Besides… as the internet is quickly replacing newspapers I see the same pressure about to bear down on the textbook industry. Textbooks with multi-media… hmm… this is actually starting to sound ground-breaking. My college age son (actually I) spent about $400 on textbooks last quarter… it wouldn’t take too many quarters of a lower priced electronic delivery of textbooks to pay for the device.
The article and video here:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01/05/dreaming-up-textbooks-on-an-apple-tablet
suggests that textbook manufacturers are pretty ready for this…
Interesting. I thought they would be more conservative than that (like the newspaper publishers who still don’t get it).