Apple’s still quiet on the whole thing (and will be until next Wednesday), but the Wall Street Journal has spilled some more Apple Tablet beans. Yummy, media-centric chocolate covered Tablet beans. The original WSJ article can be found here (you have to subscribe to get the whole thing), but I’ll summarize some of the more interesting bits below:
- The Tablet is designed to be shared. The UI lends itself to family use w/multiple family members able to use the device to check mail, read news, play back media, etc.
- One of the “sharing” features discussed is possible facial recognition of each family member. This may or may not be available in the first tablet released though.
- A 10″ screen still seems to be the favorite display contender
- The iTunes store may be decoupled from the iTunes application and offered as a standalone website – ie: no need to run iTunes to purchase music.
- Apple’s been in talks with TV networks – they want to provide a”Best of TV” service where you could subscribe to packages containing the top TV shows from each network. These could be streamed to your tablet / computer on-demand.
- Apple’s also been chatting up traditional publishers, looking for content for the Tablet. The idea here is to offer “enhanced” ebooks with multimedia features not available on current ereader devices.
- Electronic Arts has been tapped to create and demonstrate games for the Tablet.
- Finally, Apple has their eye on the education market and may be positioning the tablet to take advantage of this (see previous point about ebooks – think interactive textbooks for starters, and perhaps an iTunes Education store in the future?)
Overall, I’m very excited by what the WSJ has uncovered. As I expected, Apple is taking a very different tack with their Tablet. Rather than positioning it as a crippled laptop (Tablet PCs / UMPCs), they’re building a whole content ecosystem with the Tablet at the center.
The upcoming Apple Event just got a lot more interesting.
Mike is a former sysadmin and embedded developer, who worked on several prototype tablet devices way back in the dot-com era. He's also a non-practicing physicist and a big fan of anything resembling a tablet computer (or a telescope).
Let’s wait and see, but it would be great if the device was shared easily. In my opinion all the iPhones are little islands right now. No easy ways of sharing content at all! Put 3 iPhones/iPod touch users in a room and they can’t do anything together! Always strikes me as odd none of the bloggers have picked up on this blatant annoyance. No easy photo sharing, contact sharing or apps sharing without extra apps.