Rumors Suggest Apple Tablet to Revolutionize Mobile Computing, Publishing

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Related subjects: I.T., In the Loop, Media, Science & Technology Comments (1)

27 December 2009 :: staff

Apple is reportedly poised to introduce a brand-new device that has the potential to revolutionize not only mobile computing and communication, but also design, workflow and publishing. We’ve written before about the prospective Apple tablet and its capabilities, but as rumor and reporting converge to give us a better picture, we can be a little more certain of the landmark moment in the evolution of computing and communications the device will achieve.

Most importantly, the Apple tablet, with a multi-touch, navigationally enabled touchscreen, like the iPhone, will be the most advanced, most cohesive, most detailed and productive setting in which consumers will be given the ability to physically manipulate digital files. For some, this means only a very advanced graphic-user interface, but for others, it means a fundamental shift in the way we process and organize computable data, a merging of the physical and the virtual.

The Apple tablet will not be as productively amorphous as Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense device, which literally pours computable and searchable data out into the physical world, but we can say that the tablet moment will be one that moves our control of digital data in that direction. The device will pool media, computing, communications, in the way full-size computers do, but in an interface that is more fluid, allowing both more freedom and a more complex and intense human-data relationship in everyday settings.

As reported by CNN Money:

If the rumors are true, the tablet will be able to do basically everything a gadget could possibly do. It’s an e-reader, a gaming device, and a music player. You can watch TV and movies on it and surf the Internet (or so we’ve heard). And it will have thousands of third-party apps available for it … or maybe it will run Mac OS X. That’s all still unknown.

In a sense, the goal is to craft a device that combines the convenience and ease of use of an iPhone, an Amazon Kindle and a laptop computer, with the rich media environment one expects from a digital television, only smaller in size. Not properly pocket-sized, it is not a stretch to imagine the Apple tablet wearing a book-style leather cover like the Kindle can, in order to give it easy protection and easy access for the on-the-go browser-reader-music-listening-workflow-managing everyman.

Slash Gear is reporting that Apple registered the domain name islate.com in 2007, a possible indication it will be calling its tablet computer by that name. The iSlate is also rumored to be a revolution in “the way we interact with new media: websites, video, music, magazines, newspaper, and books that are all moving to digital format”.

The Fortune Brainstorm Tech blog lists the following as key specs of the coming Apple tablet:

• Apple has settled on a 10.1-inch multi-touch display using the iPhone’s LTPS LCD technology, not the considerably more expensive OLED technology suggested in earlier reports.
• Apple has been approaching U.S. book publishers with what Reiner describes as “a very attractive proposal” for distributing their content: an App Store-type 30/70 split (30% for Apple) with no exclusivity requirement. [See UPDATE below.]
• According to Reiner, publishers are disgruntled by Amazon’s (AMZN) terms, which force exclusivity, disallow advertising and demand a “wolfish cut” of revenue. The typical Kindle/publisher split, he says, is 50/50, rising to 30/70 if Amazon gets exclusivity.
• Apple’s tablet would make ebooks more attractive for the education market by simplifying functions such as scribbling marginalia.

Yair Reiner, of Oppenheimer, predicts Apple will be able to sell 1 million to 1.5 million units per quarter at an average sale price of $1,000. A lower price would likely mean higher sales, and a more rapid proliferation of the potential paradigm shift through the consumer computing market, including business and university settings.

MG Siegler, writing for TechCrunch, explains:

It’s not a computer with a mess of peripherals and/or physical buttons. If a media and web-centric computer were being designed today with no thought to what the computing norms of the past were, it would be a tablet.

It also points to the future of interacting with computers. The mouse and keyboard will one day die and everything will be touch and gesture-based. We’ll be living in a future with Minority Report, Star Trek, and Avatar interactive technology. To many of us, few things are more exciting. To others, that concept is foreign and as such, scary. Regardless, it will happen and the tablet computer is the latest, and perhaps most important step in a line of technology taking us there.

Apple is clearly not only planning to be on the cutting edge, but is plotting out the cutting edge, where standard consumer market products for mobile computing meet the future of an entirely different kind of human-data interface. Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense gets much closer to the Minority Report computing model Siegler cites, but Apple is providing the rich design environment needed to make touch computing truly intuitive and user-friendly.

Its success will likely hinge on whether its market is limited by a binding contract with a mobile communications provider like AT&T. This is fundamental, because while iPhone is a phone, and requires phone service, the iSlate is supposed to be a true computing device, combining some of the best features of the iPhone with the scalability and workflow-relevance of the standard laptop. Requiring people to buy into monthly contracts in order to user a new laptop is a serious drawback, and likely means Apple is busy finding ways to guarantee a level of mobile wireless web access without exclusivity.

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