We’ve all heard the rumors of the Apple Tablet/iSlate, and yes there is a lot of those around. First some background for all these rumors. Rumors about a Apple Tablet have been around since the Newton was released and it’s probably one of the biggest vaporware products today. Never have a product, that is not confirmed nor suggested by the manufacturer, been given this much hype. There has been least 5-10 rumors every single day for the last 2-3 months about this product. So you might ask: “what’s all this hype about?” I’ll try to answer that and other question in this post. I’ll try to shortly describe some of the major rumors about it and then you can make your own decision on wether or not you believe all of them.
One of the biggest things going on right now is the story of Apple “secretly” registering domains and trademarks back in 2007 as a way of securing the brand for a future product launch. In 2007 the domain iSlate.com was transferred to the registrar MarkMonitor.com which we know is responsible for Apple domain and trademark registrations. Of course the name of the real registrar was hidden behind MarkMonitor.com. This looks suspicious but it could just be a coincidence.
But the rumor site MacRumors.com investigated the domain further and they found out that sometime in 2007 the real owner of the domain was exposed for a short time. Guess who was the owner of the domain, yes you guessed it, Apple. So the name definitely seems to be a plausible name for the Apple Tablet or should I call it the Apple iSlate.
Besides the domain name pointing towards iSlate as the name the trademark is registered in Europe by a lawfirm Apple is known for using to register trademarks. In the United States the trademark is registered to a unknown company in Delaware, Slate Computing LLC. Back before the iPhone was launched a little unknown company also in Delaware registered that trademark too. Now this could of course all be a coincidence but someone dug deeper and found out that a Regina Porter had signed for the trademark. Regina Porter is also an employee at Apple Inc, with the title Senior Trademark Specialist. So we just found out that Apple is making up small “fake ” companies so they can register trademarks and domains without anybody knowing, no big deal everybody is doing that.
So Apple registered the domain iSlate.com back in 2007 and registered a trademark in both Europe and The US. Apple has also told iPhone developers to start preparing their applications for a bigger screen. Rumors are saying that the iPhone SDK 4 and OS4 has tools for a bigger resolution.
Apple has also rented Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco the 27th of January so it’s expected to be launched there and shipping within 2-6 months.
A reader at CultOfMac just got a tip from a friend who is working at Apple, saying that the tablet will have a very “steep learning curve”. I’m not buying because of multiple things:
- Apple is not known for releasing things that doesn’t work out of the box and intuitive.
- When Steve Jobs showed the iPhone for the first time he spent almost 2 hours explaining how revolutionizing this new device was. After this Apple made videos where people could learn to use their new gadget.
- A “steep learning curve” could be two things, either it means there will be a lot of learning or a learning that is easy and goes fast.
- I think Apple will try to just add more gestures to their already functioning multitouch technologies.
- More VoiceOver controls like we know from the iPhone and OS X.
Then some rumors about a 3D graphic User Interface used for navigation and such. It should be a 3D quality UI but on a two dimensional screen. I’m not so sure about this rumor tho.
More cloud based operating system. It does indeed seem like we are moving more and more into the cloud but I think we still need some things before a 100% cloud-based operating system can be used on this tablet.
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