Computer, Phone or Something else!!!

While people all over the world wonder if its true, the rumour about Apple releasing its 800 dollar Tablet, or in simpler words big-screen iPod touch, is doing the rounds quite furtively. With news agencies from all across the globe reporting about it, this could well be the most talked about and most awaited gadget of the year!!

Taiwan based site InfoTimes reports in Chinese that the device will have a 9.7 inch touchscreen, making it just a little smaller than most notebooks with additional touchscreen features and iPod look-and-feel. According to another website, it will run the full Mac OS X and have a slot loading Super Drive, a GPS chip which resembles the one in iPhone and an Intel Core Duo processor, which would most probably be Intel’s Atom. Whether it will be based on the iPhone or MacBook form-factor remains to be seen.

While all this remains a speculation, tech blog Venture Beat reports that PA Semi, the chip company Apple bought last year, will be designing the chips for an Apple tablet in house. The PA Semi team has some renowned chip designers, and there have been recent Wall Street Journal reports that major chip designers have personally been overseeing the development of a tablet-like device, and that Apple also has a large chip design project in the works. If you look at all these reports, we’d say its true!!

A tablet wouldn’t be the first choice for writing long e-mails or a book, although it can be done. However, it could be paired with a Bluetooth keyboard and/or a voice recognition application like MacSpeech’s Dictate. If released indeed, it would be a great accessory/vertical market Mac, i.e a perfect second Mac that one can carry to a meeting, class etc. It would also be perfect for consuming Web-based content like RSS feed, Web pages, email etc. The larger screen area will improve data input, providing more on-screen space for an iPhone-like virtual keyboard, as well as haptic feedback. The new Apple tablet might just be the gadget to mark the return of handwriting recognition to the Mac.

October would be a good time for such an announcement since Apple, like always, is unlikely to announce before availability in its stores, and such an announcement at that time would mean that the tablet could be an exciting Christmas gift for Apple fans at least!! People’s response from all over the world to the rumors show to what extent such a device is awaited. It would be the perfect couch computing device and will create a whole new category of computers.