The Apple Tablet Cometh

In a little over a week, Apple has invited members of the press to show off its “latest creation.” Chances are that Apple will reveal the iTablet at this event. Chances are that Apple will revolutionize the Tablet segment just like they revolutionized the Smartphone segment when they released the iPhone a few years back.

There is a lot of speculation as to what this Tablet will be capable of. If you look at the App Store and the recent addition of magazines to it such as GQ, you might get a pretty good idea what this Tablet will be capable of. I downloaded GQ on my iPhone and although I enjoyed flipping through the first few pages, I realized that I need a much bigger screen to fully appreciate it.

It also makes good sense financially for both Apple and the publisher- in this case Conde Nast. The cover price for the paper edition of GQ is roughly US$3.00. Through subscriptions, you can get it down to a $1. The digital version requires lesser resources (paper, printing etc.) so technically, it Conde Nast should be able to sell it at an even lower price. Yet, the AppStore lists it $2.99 at the moment which puts $1 in Apple’s pockets and $2 in Conde Nast’s.

So its pretty much a given that this Tablet will act as a newsreader. Another potential feature would be to watch videos on it. Again, the AppStore started selling higher definition videos some time back and the iPhone’s screen is a bit too small to watch anything longer than a music video. Web browsing experience should bring the Tablet on par with your notebook and the Tablet definitely needs to be much thinner and lighter along with offering a much higher battery life to chuck your Macbook Air for browsing.

So if I was to guess, I would say the iTablet or whatever apple calls it will be an extremely thin and light device with a screen size between 10 to 13 inches. I would pick 11 inches with a resolution of 1280×720 pixels to allow 720p videos played back at their native resolution. It should be a full multi-touch device lacking any physical keyboard and will turn on and off instantly like the iPhone.

I cant really say what the interface will look like as unlike the iPhone, you will have plenty of resources to run multiple things at one time. Maybe it will look like OS X’s desktop or the dashboard or maybe it wont. What I do know is that it will look incredible as the user-interface is one thing that Apple is REALLY good at.

We’ll find out all the details next Wednesday. It will be a very long week.