David Pogue plays The Apple Guessing Game about the iTablet. I mostly agree with him but here are my thoughts.
I'd like a tablet sized device for around the house. I want it mostly to consume media (music, videos, documents, web surfing). I want it to be portable around the house (so not a desktop) and more comfortable to hold than a laptop and have a bigger screen than an iPhone. The standard guess of a 10" screen sounds pretty good, though showing an 8.5" x 11" document at full size (how none European of me) would be great.
I think a camera facing the reader to enable video iChat would be great. It doesn't need one facing away like the iPhone has.
Obviously it needs wifi but a cellular connection should be an add-on like the iPod Touch vs the iPhone.
WIth a touch screen it would be fine for taking light notes or annotating documents but not too much more. An iPhone like virtual keyboard would be much better at something approaching full sized. See this comparison of input technologies. Some extra multi-touch stuff as has been rumored would be fine too.
A friend wants it to control his Apple TV and that sounds fine to me. I suspect like the Remote apps on the iPhone there will be better remotes apps on a bigger screen. Also I suspect it will let me access my iTunes etc. collection on the device (via syncing or streaming or both).
I suspect the talk about a multi-touch iWork or syncing your iTunes to the cloud to access it from anywhere will come with a later release (if at all). I also suspect the updated iLife will include stuff for rending on the table device (make movies in iMovie and photo albums in iPhoto for it).
It might be just because I'm reading through a 186 page pdf of a Supreme Court decision now and it's tying me to my desk, but it would be great to have a tablet device to read this comfortably on the couch. I'd like the Mac OS built in dictionary functionality too. And yes, this would make it comparable to a Kindle so I suspect Apple will have the ability to buy magazines or books from it too though perhaps that comes later. All the buying will obviously happen through the iTunes store.
The result might be a laptop with the ease of use of an iPhone. It's not general purpose and you wouldn't use it for Photoshop or creating spreadsheets, but it would be a great living room device.
3 comments:
and it needs a dock that sits connected to the entertainment system, thus replacing the AppleTV as well.
Can I just say that I want what you described as well. I ended up buying an iPod Touch as the too small substitute for what you have just described. You can't take notes worth a damn on the touch, but it is still good for Twitter, or short e-mails or comments.
The touch is a consumption device just as a tablet would be. Though a tablet might be big enough to make input easier. My dream is to be able to carry a TV with web access around. I have been actively waiting for five years for such a thing. It took me a year of hemming and hawing to get the iPod touch. At a projected price of $1000 for Apple's tablet, there will be much more hemming and hawing.
You get one and tell us what you think.
Then of course there's the old adage, always skip the first generation of Apple hardware...
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