The self-confessed Apple fanatic on why the launch of the company's new tablet will change everything

• Stephen Fry
• The Guardian, Friday 29 January 2010
• Article history

The Apple iPad Photograph: HO/REUTERS

Article courtesy of stephenfry.com/blog

Well bless my soul and whiskers. This is the first time I've joined the congregation at the Church of Apple for a new product launch. I've watched all the past ones, downloaded the Quicktime movies and marvelled as Apple's leader has stood before an ovating faithful and announced the switch to Intel, the birth of iPod, the miniMac, the iTunes Store, OS X, iPhoto, the swan's-neck iMac, the Shuffle, Apple retail stores, the iPhone, the titanium Powerbook, Garageband, the App Store and so much more. But this time I finally made it. I went to San Francisco for the launch of the iPad. Oh, happy man.

The day had special resonance. In front of his family, friends and close colleagues stood the man who founded Apple, was fired from Apple and came back to lead Apple to a greatness, reach and influence that no one on earth imagined. But a year ago, it is now clear, there was a very strong possibility that Steve Jobs would not live to see 2010 and the birth of his newest baby.

With revenues of $15.6bn, Apple is now the largest mobile-device company in the world, Jobs told the subdued but excited 600 people packed into the Yerba Buena Cultural Center for the Arts theatre. A few more triumphant housekeeping notes followed and then we were into the meat of it. Well, the whole event is available to be watched online, you don't need me to describe it. He picked up an iPad and walked us through. Afterwards I was allowed to play with one myself.

I know there will be many who have already taken one look and pronounced it to be nothing but a large iPhone and something of a disappointment. I have heard these voices before. In June 2007 when the iPhone was launched I collected a long list of "not impressed", "meh", "big deal", "style over substance", "it's all hype", "my HTC TyTN can do more", "what a disappointment", "majorly underwhelmed" and similar reactions. They can hug to themselves the excuse that the first release of iPhone was 2G, closed to developers and without GPS, and that cut-and-paste and many other features that have since been incorporated. Neither they, nor I, nor anyone, predicted the game-changing effect the phone would so rapidly have as it evolved into a 3G, third-party app rich, compass- and GPS-enabled market leader. Even if it had proved a commercial and business disaster instead of an astounding success, iPhone would remain the most significant release of its generation because of its effect on the smartphone habitat. Does anybody seriously believe that Google, Nokia, Samsung, Palm, BlackBerry and a dozen others would since have produced the product line they have without the 100,000-volt Taser shot up the jacksie that the iPhone delivered to the entire market?

Nonetheless, even if they couldn't see that three billion apps would be downloaded in two years (that's half a million app downloads a day, give or take) could they not see that this device was gorgeous, beautifully made, very powerful and capable of development into something extraordinary? I see those qualities in the iPad. Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come, but also like iPhone 1.0 (and Jokanaan himself too come to that) iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want now and one that will not be matched this year by any company. In the future, when it has two cameras for fully featured video conferencing, GPS and who knows what else built in (1080 HD TV reception and recording and nano projection, for example) and when the iBook store has recorded its 100-millionth download and the thousands of accessories and peripherals that have invented uses for iPad that we simply can't now imagine – when that has happened it will all have seemed so natural and inevitable that today's nay-sayers and sceptics will have forgotten that they ever doubted its potential.

"What can I do with it that I can't do with a laptop or an iPhone?" they might now be objecting. "Too big for my pocket, not big enough for serious use. Don't see the need. It's a solution looking for a problem."

There are many issues you could have with the iPad. No multitasking, still no Adobe Flash. No camera, no GPS. They all fall away the minute you use it. I cannot emphasise enough this point: "Hold your judgment until you've spent five minutes with it." No YouTube film, no promotional video, no keynote address, no list of features can even hint at the extraordinary feeling you get from actually using and interacting with one of these magical objects. You know how everyone who has ever done Who Wants to Be A Millionaire? always says, "It's not the same when you're actually here. So different from when you're sitting at home watching." You know how often you've heard that? Well, you'll hear the same from anyone who's handled an iPad. The moment you experience it in your hands, you know this is class. This is a different order of experience. The speed, the responsiveness, the smooth glide of it, the richness and detail of the display, the heft in your hand, the rightness of the actions and gestures that you employ, untutored and instinctively, it's not just a scaled up iPhone or a scaled-down multitouch enhanced laptop – it is a whole new kind of device. And it will change so much. Newspapers, magazines, literature, academic textbooks, brochures, fliers and pamphlets are going to be transformed (poor Kindle). Specific dedicated apps and enhancements will amaze us. You will see characters in movies use the iPad. Jack Bauer will want to return for another season of 24 just so he can download schematics and track vehicles on it. James Bond will have one. Jason Bourne will have one. Some character, in a Tron-like way, might even be trapped in one.

There's much to like, of course. The physical beauty and classy build quality, as in anything designed by Jonathan Ive. The shockingly low price — $499 for the basic model. The contract-free, unlocked nature of the 3G version. But there are two chief reasons for its guaranteed success.

1. It is so simple. It is basically a highly responsive capacitative piece of glass with solid-state memory and an IPS display. Just as a book is basically paper bound together in a portable form factor. The simplicity is what allows everyone, us, software developers, content providers and accessory manufacturers to pour themselves into it, to remake it according to the limits of their imagination. I'll stop before I get too Disney.

2. It is made by Apple. I'm not being cute here. If it was made by Hewlett Packard, they wouldn't have global control over the OS or the online retail outlets. If it was made by Google, they would have tendered out the hardware manufacture to HTC. Apple – and it is one of the reasons some people distrust or dislike them – control it all. They've designed the silicon, the A4 chip that runs it all, they've designed the batteries, they've overseen every detail of the commercial, technological, design and software elements. No other company on earth does that. And being Apple it hasn't been released without (you can be sure) Steve Jobs being wholly convinced that it was ready. "Not good enough, start again. Not good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough." How many other CEOs say that until their employees want to murder them? That's the difference.

I have always thought Hans Christian Andersen should have written a companion piece to the Emperor's New Clothes, in which everyone points at the Emperor shouting, in a Nelson from The Simpsons voice, "Ha ha! He's naked." And then a lone child pipes up, "No. He's actually wearing a really fine suit of clothes." And they all clap hands to their foreheads as they realise they have been duped into something worse than the confidence trick, they have fallen for what EM Forster called the lack of confidence trick. How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say: "Not impressed." I'm not advocating dumb gullibility, but it is has always amused me that those who instinctively dislike Apple for being apparently cool, trendy, design-fixated and so on, are the ones who are actually so damned cool and so damned sensitive to stylistic nuance that they can't bear to celebrate or recognise obvious class, beauty and desire. The fact is that Apple users like me are the uncoolest people on earth: we salivate, dribble, coo, sigh, grin and bubble with delight.

No, I don't have shares in Apple. I came so close to buying some as an act of defensive defiance in the early 90s when every industry insider and expert in the field agreed that Apple had six months to go before going bust. But I didn't. If I had done I could now afford to buy you all an iPad. Yes, I do like and have tried to champion OpenSource software. How can I square that with my love of Apple? I'm complicated. I'm a human being. I also believe in a mixed economy and mixed nuts. I love our NHS and the National Theatre, but I also love Fortnum and Mason and Hollywood movies. "Apple," Steve Jobs said, "stands at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts." This statement confused non-Americans who are not familiar with the phrase "liberal arts" but I think shows the fundamental cultural seriousness of Jobs and Apple, which in turn explains their huge success and impact. He might perhaps more accurately have said that Apple "stands at the intersection of technology, the liberal arts and commerce".

You may or may not be in the queue for an iPad in March, April, May or June. Or you may decide to stay your hand for version 2.0 or 3.0. But believe me the iPad is here to stay and nothing will be quite the same again. You should know, however, that plenty of industry commentators disagree with me. They have pronounced themselves less enthralled. It is perfectly possible I will be proved wrong about its enduring, game-changing place in the landscape and that people will gleefully rub my nose in this blog in two year's time. I'm certainly not wrong about how soul-scorchingly beautiful it is to use though. And that, for me, is enough.

stephenfry.com/blog

With rumours still flying left and right as we close in to Apple’s expected Tablet announcement next Wednesday, perhaps the most sought-after missing piece is still its name. Could it be iGuide, or iSlate?

Maybe — but it looks like iPad is definitely a strong contender as well, according to the Mac News Network. Apple has filed for a trademark on that name in Canada, Europe, and Hong Kong, but in the U.S. that trademark is already tied up by Fujitsu. The Japanese corporation has an existing product using that name: a handheld device used by workers in retail.

Yet while Fujitsu first filed for the trademark in 2003, at some point they stopped responding to the US Patent and Trademark Office’s requests for additional information. The USPTO never awarded the official trademark and ended up declaring the name “abandoned” in April 2009.

Although Fujitsu began pursuing the iPad trademark again last June, Apple has reportedly filed at least three requests to extend the deadline for presenting opposition to Fujitsu’s claim. The company now has until February 28 to submit evidence, potentially positioning itself as the rightful owner of the iPad trademark. Launching an actual product under the iPad name before that date may strengthen Apple’s legal claim to the mark, leading to logical speculation that iPad is the chosen forerunner for the tablet’s name.

What’s your favorite name for the still-mythical Apple Tablet? Place your bets now, people!

January 5th, 2010 by keith kleiner

The hype and attention surrounding the impending launch of the Apple tablet is a fascinating marvel in the tech industry.  The product has not even been launched yet – Apple (AAPL) has not officially confirmed that the product is even in development – but nevertheless the entire tech community from media to consumers is absolutely enthralled by the Apple tablet, or islate, or whatever you want to call it.  And yet despite all of the hype, only a small few, such as Paul Buchheit, have given a decent explanation as to why we would want this mystical tablet when we already have smartphones, netbooks, and desktop computers.  In this post I will propose some ideas about how and why the tablet concept is going to differentiate itself from its computing brethren and revolutionize the world.

Too big to fit in your pocket, too wimpy to compete with a desktop computer, too limited without the ability to make phone calls or use as a handheld camera.  Thats what people are saying about the tablet.  Boy are they missing the point!

Without further ado, here are ideas about capabilities and features that a tablet will uniquely offer as compared to all other computing devices today.

Gaming:

The iphone has already revolutionized gaming with its touch screen interface, creating an entirely new gaming market and platform for people of all ages.  But with a 3.5 inch screen and limited computing resources, there is only so far you can go with iphone gaming.  The Apple tablet will play iphone games just fine, yet with its larger screen, more capable operating system, and the beefier hardware that can accompany its larger form factor, the games will be taken to an entirely new level.  The Apple tablet will be the first ever widely adopted touchscreen interface of this size.  Connect that with the itunes store for easy access to thousands of games, and you have yourself a winning recipe.  If I were a gaming company, I would be salivating all over this tablet with a vengeance.

The Ultimate E-reader:

A high quality tablet from Apple will absolutely blow the socks off of Kindle, Nook, Kurzweil’s new Blio, or any other e-reader available today.  After watching other people rave about their Kindles for the last year I finally bought one a few months ago to see what all the fuss was about.  I used my Kindle for about 2 days and then quickly relegated it to the dust bin.  No color, clunky buttons, and such a pain in the ass to bookmark, clip, share, and markup that I didn’t even bother to use such tools even if they existed.  The Apple tablet will be different.

Books, articles, magazines, and other classical print media will look stunning on the Apple tablet with beautiful colors and details.  Images and videos, sorely lacking from current e-readers like the Kindle, will come to life on the tablet.  Even more impressive will be the Apple tablet’s ability to add functionality that is simply not possible with classical printed media.  Bookmarking your favorite passages in a book will be as easy as highlighting the text with your fingers or some sort of stylus and then storing them for later reference in an easy to use, searchable, graphical menu system.  Borrowing from what we have learned on the internet with web documents, the Apple e-reader will allow you to clip, link, share, and in many other ways manipulate what you are reading.  Integration with social networks will allow you to easily forward or share passages, images, and clips from e-reader documents with friends and colleagues.  At some point, your friends or anyone else will be able to markup books and other documents on your tablet with comments, opinions, and other supplemental information of their own.  Your e-book copy of Pride and Prejudice will not be a static document, but rather it will be something that is alive, connected to the rest of the internet through social networks and web 2.0 paradigms.  When a character in a book visits real world places such as a building or location you will be able to click/press on the words and pull up a wikipedia reference or any other reference about the place.  Many of these capabilities exist naturally on web documents, but never has an e-reader offered such capability.  With the Apple tablet, traditional print media will finally receive the steroids boost that modern web based documents have enjoyed for more than a decade.

A la cart media:

With the launch of the Apple tablet, a la cart programming will be catapulted to a comprehensive level of offerings that will cause traditional cable broadcasters to shake in their boots.  In the United States and in much of the world people pay their cable company for hundreds of channels even though most of them are crap.  What we all really want is to order the programs that we want, when we want them, and we don’t want to overpay for stupid all inclusive packages.  If I only want to watch Seinfeld reruns and football why do I have to buy the hundreds of other channels offering stuff that I don’t want?  The iphone has already brought us substantial a la cart programming through itunes.  Music, movies, lectures, and audio books are just a taste of the offerings currently available through the itunes store.  With the launch of the Apple tablet, the already emerging trend of individualized a la cart offerings will be further entrenched.

Once millions of Apple tablets are out in the wild the critical mass will be achieved for individuals and independents to sell their own digital creations – movies, short videos, essays, tutorials, books – for a price that they choose – directly to tablet owners.  An entire new market of individuals selling content directly to other individuals with itunes as the intermediary and the Apple tablet as the viewing device may emerge.  Apple doesn’t offer this sort of market at the moment because the iphone/itouch devices have not had the e-reader capability, screen size, and other features to make such a market feasible.  With the launch of the tablet such a market may be born.

If it scares you just a little bit that Apple’s grip on our lives as the middleman to so much media infrastructure will be so complete then you are not alone.  The Apple tablet will only intensify the already scary walled garden that Apple has been building with its iphone/itouch/itunes platform during the last decade.

Our only hope of saving consumers from this disastrous enclosure will be Google, the white knight of technology that has several times now broken the grip of companies by creating open standards and open products such as android, chrome OS, chrome browser, free DNS, Google reader, Gmail, and so on.  As a former employee of Google I am of course biased, but seriously if Google doesn’t save us from Apple’s walled garden, who will?

3D interface:

A patent uncovered by Gus Sentementes at the Baltimore Sun indicates that the Apple tablet may offer a revolutionary jump in user interfaces with a move to 3 dimensions.  Objects will be released from their 2D cages, allowing us to spin them, flip them, rotate them, and so on.  This will have obvious implications for the gaming revolution cited above, but will also offer new use cases for interacting with data and media.  3D interfaces such as those from Bumptop been relegated to research labs and small use cases thus far because a massively adopted consumer device has never offered the large touch screen interface that makes them practical.  3D interfaces simply don’t work very well with a keyboard and mouse!  The world has been waiting for a device such as the Apple tablet to take 3D user interfaces out of the lab and into the mainstream, and this is exactly what could happen.

Accelerometer, GPS, and touch interface like iphone, but better:

The accelerometer, GPS, and touch interface offered by the iphone has revolutionized our options for interacting with games and information.  The Apple Tablet will take this paradigm to the next level.  Working with spreadsheets, writing essays, sorting images, and countless other tasks simply are not practical on the limited sized screen and wimpy processing power of the iphone.  The Apple tablet will offer the screen size and the computing resources to perform all of these tasks and more, but now these tasks will be augmented with the capabilities offered by GPS, accelerometers, and the touch interface.  Sorting your thousands of photos could be done by “pouring” them into different virtual buckets.  Items within excel style spreadsheets could be sorted not by clicking and dragging them with a mouse and shift/ctrl keys, but rather with natural grasping and dragging motions from your fingertips.  The possibilities are enormous.  Entire new use cases and methods for interacting with data will be born.

Stylus:

Manipulating information on the Apple tablet with our fingertips will be extremely useful, but certain operations will require more precision than our fat stubby fingers can offer.  For more precise manipulation of the screen, a stylus will be created with a tiny tip capable of manipulating parts of the screen perhaps as small as a single pixel.

Awesome Video Chat:

Video chat on the Apple tablet will be an obvious killer feature.  Video chat isn’t something unique to the tablet of course – smartphones, netbooks, and desktops already offer such capability.  What will differentiate the video chat offered on the tablet is mobility and size.  You can’t easily pickup your clumsy netbook or your stationary desktop PC in the middle of a video chat, but the tablet will make this a breeze.  The tablet will allow you to move to conference room G in a building if your coworker kicks you out of conference room B without you having to stop your video session.  At home you will be able to show your video counterpart something in another part of the house, or go grab a snack in the kitchen, carrying your handy tablet in tow without interrupting the video session.  Beyond mobility, integration with the other applications and software on the tablet will make tablet based video chat an awesome experience.

Amazing expandability with third party devices using standardized ports, such as USB:

If Apple is smart they will use open interfaces such as USB to enable a vibrant ecosystem of third party manufacturers around the globe to create an infinite array of attachments, addons, and upgrades to your Apple tablet.  Consumer electron microscopes, printers, high end speaker systems, data storage devices, and all of the other devices that we now connect to our desktops and netbooks should be able to plug into your tablet.  But now they will be able to leverage the unique offerings of the tablet, such as GPS, accelerometer, and touch screen – something that traditional desktops and netbooks cannot offer.

Excellent sound quality:

With its larger form factor the Apple tablet will be able to incorporate excellent sound quality right into the device.  This type of sound quality simply isn’t possible with a tiny iphone today.  For even better sound quality, off the shelf speakers will plug right into your tablet, bringing the highest sound quality available right to your tablet for presentations, watching movies, whatever.

Multiple users at the same time:

The iphone, netbook, and desktop computer are not designed for two or more people to work on them simultaneously.  I watch youtube videos on my iphone all the time with friends and family, but the tiny screen size makes it inconvenient for even 2 or 3 people to hover around the video at the same time.  The large screen of the tablet will fix this.

Collaborative activities where two people are manipulating the screen at the same time will also be an interesting use case.  Games could be played with opposing players each protecting their side of the tablet.  In certain use cases it may be useful for two people to physically manipulate data, documents, or media at the same time.

Beautiful, Custom Built Operating System And Hardware:

The operating system and hardware powering the tablet will serve as the foundation for all of the features described thus far.  Without a beautiful, graceful, intuitive user interface the tablet will fail.  Nobody doubts Apple’s ability to produce beautiful hardware and software, and in this area the tablet will not disappoint.  The OS and user interface for the tablet will be simple to use, gorgeous, and built from the ground up to perform its purpose.  The Dells of the world will be forced to adapt the ill-suited Microsoft windows for the creation of their tablet wanna-be contenders – an automatic recipe for failure.

Conclusion:

The mythical Apple tablet lies at the nexus of converging trends in mobile devices, touchscreen interfaces, and personalized content anywhere, anytime, and on demand.  Therein lies the confusion about the tablet’s place in our world but also the beauty of what it will offer.

Amazingly, even though Apple has not officially announced that it is creating a tablet device, the industry has already embraced the idea of the tablet anyway.  Just this week Freescale Semiconductor announced plans to launch a tablet PC later this year.  Google is rumored to be working on its own competitor.  Dell already has a tablet-like device called the XT2 Tablet that is commercially available right now.  Dozens of other companies are expected to make tablet announcements this week at the CES 2010 in Las Vegas.  2010 is already the year of the tablet based purely on rumor and speculation alone.  It really is an unbelievable phenomenon that we are witnessing unfold.

Too bad for the competition that Apple is going to whip their butts all over the map.  Apple has reportedly been working on the tablet for at least a year, possibly two.  Whatever dinky products other companies dream up at CES or elsewhere, it will be too little too late.

The Apple tablet is going to be a revolutionary device and I can’t wait for it to come into this world.  Nevertheless, I am fearful of the powerful grip over our lives that it will deliver to Apple.  Google, if you are listening, please save us from a one player market and give us a device and a platform that is every bit as good as Apple’s but free of its walled garden.  You are our only hope against Apple hegemony!

Intel 45nm quad core chip: apparently, not to be found in the much-expected Apple tablet

With Apple having neatly stolen some of the thunder with the carefully-leaked-to-the-Wall-Street-Journal story (we'll explain why later) on Monday about the upcoming "iTablet" (suggest a better name, please), more details seem to be dribbling out about the device Apple is expected to launch on Wednesday 27 January.

First, Scott Moritz at TheStreet has a story saying that the ...device won't be powered by an Intel processor. Shock! Horror? Well, no, because as Jack Schofield pointed out, nor are the iPod or iPod Touch or iPhone: they all have ARM processors inside.

Except that Moritz, quoting Ashok Kumar, an analyst with Northeast Securities, says it will be powered by a PA Semi chip. Who? PA Semi is the company that Apple bought two years ago - which we wrote about in August 2008: the PA Semi team has ARM experience and Apple has an ARM compatibility licence that would let it create ARM-alike chips but with its own power consumption and other tweaks. So it could be that the device will show off the benefits of the PA Semi acquisition.

Next: Apple has acquired Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising specialist:

"We have built our business by enabling advertisers to reach the right consumers across the mobile web and in applications. We remain focused on delivering more engaging, relevant and useful ads to mobile devices, and improving the measurement and execution of digital campaigns. Together with Apple, we look forward to developing exciting new opportunities in the future that will benefit our customers. "

Make of that what you will.

Throwaway link: John Brownlee at Cult of Mac reporting someone saying they overheard someone who works for Apple saying the device has a "steep learning curve". Well, maybe a 3D interface would fit the bill?

Finally, John Martellaro, a former Apple insider, explains about how Apple does leaks.

He explains:

"Often Apple has a need to let information out, unofficially. The company has been doing that for years, and it helps preserve Apple's consistent, official reputation for never talking about unreleased products. I know, because when I was a Senior Marketing Manager at Apple, I was instructed to do some controlled leaks.

"The way it works is that a senior exec will come in and say, 'We need to release this specific information. John, do you have a trusted friend at a major outlet? If so, call him/her and have a conversation. Idly mention this information and suggest that if it were published, that would be nice. No e-mails!'

"The communication is always done in person or on the phone. Never via e-mail. That's so that if there's ever any dispute about what transpired, there's no paper trail to contradict either party's version of the story. Both sides can maintain plausible deniability and simply claim a misunderstanding. That protects Apple and the publication.

"In the case of yesterday's story, Walt Mossberg was bypassed so that Mr. Mossberg would remain above the fray, above reproach. Also, two journalists at the WSJ were involved. That way, each one could point the finger at the other and claim, 'I thought he told me to run with this story! Sorry.'"

It's been pointed out that the last time one of the journalists in the Monday leak story wrote about Apple, it was with the surprisingly accurate - yet totally without named sources - story about Steve Jobs having had a liver transplant. Which was later, of course, completely confirmed as correct.

And why might Apple have wanted to leak those sort-of details about the iTablet? Martellaro suggests:

* "to light a fire under a recalcitrant partner"

* "to float the idea of the US$1,000 price point and gauge reaction"

* "to panic/confuse a potential competitor about whom Apple had some knowledge"

* "to whet analyst and observer expectations to make sure the right kind and number of people show up at the (presumed) January 26 event. Apple hates empty seats and demands SRO at these events."

I don't know what SRO is in the last one. But on point three, note that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer was being rumoured to announce, or at least suggest, a tablet/slate with HP in his CES opening speech tonight. Consider that spiked, Steve.

Apple schedules special event for Jan. 26, 2010

By Neil Hughes

Published: 04:55 PM EST

Apple has reportedly scheduled a media event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on Tuesday Jan. 26, 2010, for a major product announcement.

Citing inside sources, the Financial Times said Wednesday evening that Apple has rented the stage for "several days" at the end of January. Officials with Apple and the center declined to comment.

While the topic of the event is unknown, Wednesday's firestorm of tablet-related news could provide a strong hint:

• The Financial Times had reported earlier that Apple's long-rumored touchscreen device was due for a Jan 2010 unveiling, and would enter into mass production soon after. The publication said the device would have something to do with Apple's rumored negotiations with TV networks for a subscription plan for video content on iTunes.

• Analyst Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray said he believed there was a 75 percent chance that Apple will hold a special event in January. However, he said, it is not guaranteed that such an event would be about the long-rumored tablet device.

• Another report alleged that a tablet with a 7-inch screen was due to be announced in January. That's different from months of reports that the device would have a 10-inch screen, though some have speculated Apple could release both form factors.

• Silicon Alley Insider was told by a source that Apple asked developers to prepare full screen versions of their apps for a January demo. Apple reportedly wanted software to scale beyond the 320x480 pixel size of the current iPhone and iPod touch screen, but said that applications that can accommodate the larger screen size will run "just fine" on the new device.

Speculation about Apple's tablet has been rampant for months. While some believed the device would arrive this fall, AppleInsider first reported in July that the 10-inch, 3G-enabled device would debut in early 2010. The new hardware is said to have been created under the watchful eye of company co-founder Steve Jobs.

October 26th, 2009 | by Stan Schroeder

Yes, it’s more Apple Tablet rumors, but this time the rumor comes from an unlikely source: New York Times’ executive editor Bill Keller. Gawker found an interesting detail in a speech he held last week (the video is below): at one point he says that they’re planning to bring New York Times on a multitude of platforms, including the Apple Tablet.

Has Keller been reading too many Apple Tablet rumors, or does he know something that we don’t? One can speculate either way, but I’m leaning towards the latter; there may not be an official release date yet, but the Tablet is most probably real, and Apple is already making hush-hush deals with content creators such as the Times.

Looking at what Apple (and Steve Jobs) likes to do, it makes a lot of sense. First, Apple has transformed the way we listen to (and purchase) music with the iPod and iTunes; then, it changed the way we use our cellphones with the iPhone. Perhaps now Apple is interested in changing the way we consume news and read magazines (among other things)? We’ve already explored that avenue; if Keller meant what he said, it seems even more likely.

The exact quote from Keller is “I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate…” It comes at about 8.30 in the video; you can see it below.