Hasta La Gadget!

Amid all the shaky speculation about whether Apple is buying Twitter and EA, two things seem certain. First, the company is working on a 10-inch touchscreen device. Second, Apple is making a strong push into the world of gaming–as evidenced by the company’s hiring of two former Microsoft Xbox execs.

The company’s predicted push toward gaming is assumed to be focused on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Since the runaway success of the iTunes App Store, the platform has become a dominant force in the perennially popular world of casual gaming.

The company’s relative openness in terms of third-party publishers and hardware features such as  touch controls and the built-in accelerometer have seen to that. Some recent releases for the iPhone have even explored the device’s potential beyond this market, a fact that Apple will no doubt be happy to capitalize upon with its recent hires.

That Apple is working on a 10-inch touchscreen device for the summer is being treated as an inevitability, as well. Apple refuses to comment on such speculation, maintaining a typical veil of secrecy around its future product announcements. All the information that has arisen about the device thus far has come from patent applications (which, for the record, Apple files whether or not it plans to use the proposed technology) and the admissions of third-party parts manufacturers, leaks that have seemingly led Apple to consider developing more parts in-house.