Editor's Note: Apple just announced a media event on January 27 in San Francisco to announce their "Latest Creation." Tablet, anyone? We'll find out next Wednesday.
There are more leaks and rumors in the Apple world regarding their (hopefully) coming soon tablet. According to one of the "insiders" mentioned in a Boy Genius Report article, the tablet is basically an “iPhone on steroids” and the multi-touch gestures are “out of control.” I’m guessing that’s out of control in a good way. The tipster also said that it’s powered by a zippy ARM CPU, not that we expected Apple to do anything less than amazing. With an ARM processor the tablet will deliver incredible speeds and performance while reducing power consumption, something Apple has been good at in the past. Using an ARM processor will also cut down on the hardware cost for Apple meaning that maybe I won’t have to sell my first born in order to buy the tablet. Maybe. This is Apple we’re talking about.
The “multi-touch gestures” that the tipster is talking about is more than likely the product that Fingerworks was bragging about (before Apple shut down the web site in January). If this is what will be implemented into the Apple tablet, then get ready for a wild ride. The multi-touch touchpad is designed to allow the user to do pretty much everything by simply employing a few pre-programmed gestures, whether it’s scrolling, turning up the volume, or going back a page. In a press release from a while back, FingerWorks described it this way: “Mouse operations like point, click, drag, scroll, and zoom are combined seamlessly with touch-typing and multi-finger gesture everywhere on the MacNTouch's surface.” Sales Manager Jeff Green adds "People are amazed by all the things a hand gesture user interface provides. We have a large number of easy-to-use gestures that cover just about every common computer operation.” Seriously, this stuff is off the chizain!
The tablet will be running on the iPhone kernel, but the tipster didn’t know of any updates in the OS so far, supposedly Apple wanted to avoid leaks. Of course, all of this is just rumor for now. No matter how reliable a tipster may be, we won’t really know until Apple officially releases anything - possibly at their just-announced media event next Wed., January 27.
So now the speculation is that it will be a giant iPhone. Something tells me that’s not the case. I mean, that’s just not Apple’s style. If they’re going to give us something new and exciting, they’re going to give us something completely new and totally exciting. Not only that, but it would be kinda disappointing if it were just a giant iPhone. I mean, really? That’s the best you’ve got?
