Thoughts on the Apple tablet announcement tomorrow

On 26/1/2010, In Technology, By Josh
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The net and social streams are a-frenzy once more. Trust Steve Jobs and Apple to wow us all again tomorrow with the Apple tablet during the keynote.

Things to expect with the Apple Tablet

As I already argued, it will disrupt several industries at once including the Publishing industry, be it of books, music and movies. Your files will be stored in the cloud so that you will be able to access them on the go, with an online iTunes application.

It’s going to make magazines fun again, and perhaps newspapers. I say perhaps because, while some newspapers which went online and which want to charge for online access may still be fun to read, I find that more and more, I get more cutting-edge, up-to-the-minute information on sites like TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb and Mashable.

Amazon’s Kindle and all other similar single-purpose devices are dead in the water with their B&W Screens.

Few people have talked about this, but I expect that one of the major “killer-applications” of the Apple tablet is going to be mobile video-conferencing for the masses. Google missed out big time on the opportunity by not putting a front camera on the Nexus One although they have the Audible chip with the back-facing microphone to compensate for background noise. Apple is going to nail this big time and also incorporate a front-facing microphone in the new iPhone.

More importantly, the Apple tablet will allow new ways of making art -painting and music.

Imagine traveling with your tablet and composing music or drawing on the multitouch canvas and automatically uploading your creation to sites where you can sell them. This is, in many ways, liberating.

In addition, Apple will re-use the very effective multi-touch UI with its particularly organic and intuitive feel into the tablet. For now, nobody does this better, not even Google with the Nexus One.

What I don’t like about what Apple and Steve Jobs are doing with the tablet

  • Re-using iPhone O.S. instead of using MacOS X Snow Leopard. This means that until they announce iPhone O.S. 4.0, the device will still have some pain to multi-task properly and not be a general-purpose computing device of the age. Then again, Steve Jobs and Co. could surprise us tomorrow. If not, wouldn’t Google augmenting its forthcoming netbooks or tablets into full-fledged computers be a great thing?
  • Trying to sell an alternative web. Instead of transposing the existing open web onto the device, Apple wants to have it its own way, without Flash, etc… I am not too keen on this as it means getting in new ways of developing for the device as they will use something else than Flash to display magazines. However, could there be a good side to this? Maybe Apple will pave the way for accelerating a better user experience on the web.

    • Other things to expect at the announcement

  • Name: Apple iPad – most probably.
  • New Macbook Pros with more recent Intel Core i5, i7 chips.
  • iPhone O.S. 4.0, perhaps….
  • Several types of tablets, maybe…
  • Delay in actual commercial availability of the tablets, probable…
  • Oh, I forgot!: The price. It should be about $650-690 lowest. That’s because they’re already leveraging a lot of the existing technology and UI.

    • I can’t wait for the announcement tomorrow.

    In the meantime, we can dream:

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    • Hi Josh,

      iPhone OS not multi-task? I don't understand why people think it's not.

      iPhone OS is 80% MacOS X, the only difference is the application layer (UIKit instead of AppKit). The rest is the same from kernel, network stack, Quartz compositing, etc.

      The apparent "lack of multi-tasking" you're talking about is a design choice of the user interface but how do you think Mail, iPod, iCal and the Phone apps works in the background?

      And seriously, I've never seen a "normal person" that complains about it.

      iPhone OS 4.0 will be announced tomorrow.

      As far as display magazine instead of the horrible Flash, Apple will use iTunes LP (which is basically HTML5 + Javascript + WebKit); it's not really an alternative web.
    • Josh
      The current iPhone O.S. is bad at multi-tasking. Take the end-user perspective. Once you're used to how a Nexus One multi-tasks you'd find the way the iPhone or iPod touch work odd. And that's precisely why they are upgrading the O.S., O.S. 4.0 with more multi-tasking abilities. Crippling a device on this front because of UI choices is bad. In this day and age, any device should multi-task properly out-of-the-box for a user.

      Insofar that Apple will reuse existing web technologies, I am content, but for some things that existing web technologies can be used, why should I have to download an iPhone O.S. app? It's gone way overboard and dragging people into yet another proprietary system.

      Open systems have better longevity in my book.
    • Of course it can be improved but it need to be well-thought like they did for the cut & paste -- people complained about of the lack of cut & paste and now it's the best implementation around, Android fall short.

      I think Apple pretty now what they're doing -- and they're not the kind of company doing things like: "let's add a task manager because 2% of people want it."

      As far as iTunes LP, I don't know exactly the deal. There is something called iTunesKit that is used to implement iTunes LP album -- and I guess the Tablet content -- and it's pretty much web standards.
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