Apple iTouch

Unless you've been ignoring Engadget and the most of the technology press, you probably already know about the rumors that Apple will be coming out with a touch screen device with a 10" screen in the second half of the year.

All of the speculation is based on an article posted by Reuters on Wednesday this week which got it's information from a Taiwan-based magazine. Apparently Wintek, the company that manufactures the iPhone screens for Apple, will be delivering 10" touch screens to Apple this summer for some, yet unnamed, product.

At first all the news outlets predicted it would be a Netbook but a lot of smart people consider that to be unlikely. The most likely product, if there is one, would be a tablet form factor with multitouch. To me this seems the most likely. I also think that the device will leverage the iPhone SDK and its UI will look like a cross between the UI for Mac OS X and the iPhone.

To really make a splash the tablet would need to support both multitouch and a stylus - so that it can be used for both precision drawing and less precise touching. It will be interesting to see what comes out of all this. With Safari now supporting multitouch gestures with JavaScript and Apple having established its multitouch SDK and its App Store application market place, I think a tablet - long desired but never successfully implemented for mainstream adoption - would be a great new product for the company.

If you take a look at the Air, which is not a tablet but a laptop, Apple has already gained some much need experience with the ultra-thin larger form factor. I think they'll leverage that experience to create a tablet that is thinner than Air but thicker than an iPhone. The device will include a touchscreen and a capacitance compatible stylus, and will pretty much be all screen. The device will probably sport the Snow Leopard operating system but its interface will be more like the iPhone than a Mac.

It's also likely that they will not call it a tablet or, God forbid, a "Netbook". Apple doesn't like mainstream category labels. Their iPhone has never been called a "smart-phone" by Apple and their laptops are called "PowerBooks", "Mac Books" but never "laptops" by Apple. I suspect they'll use "iTouch" as the product name - if some other company owns the "iTouch" name they'll just license it like they licensed the brand name "iPhone" from Cisco.

What's cool, as a blogger, is that if I'm right I can always point back to this blog as demonstrating how far sighted I am. If I'm wrong: no one will remember this post anyway. ;-)