Hasta La Gadget!

Looks like buttonless is in this season.

No, not on this spring’s selection of evening wear. We’re talking about renderings of HP’s rumored webOS-powered tablet published this week on Engadget. It’s a sleek, all-black rendition of what we may be seeing from HP soon, and like the soon to be debuted Motorola Xoom, the tablet has got a button-free face.

While the pictures, leaked by an anonymous Engadget source, aren’t the most detailed, there are a few new things we can glean from taking a look. The finish on the back of the all-black tablet is slick-looking, differentiated from the rubberized backing you might find on, say, the new Galaxy Tab 4G. There’s a mini USB port at the bottom of the tablet along with front-facing camera, both found in many of this year’s forthcoming tablets. Two speakers appear to be on the left side and one on the right, a configuration which adapts to stereo listening in both portrait and landscape orientations. And of course, Palm’s webOS is running on the mystery tablet’s screen.

While HP is rumored to have both a 7-inch and 9-inch tablet in the works — codenames “Opal” and “Topaz,” respectively — the pictures we saw were of Topaz. Engadget has posted additional details on the HP tablets, reporting that they will be bundled with a cloud-based storage service, HP’s “Beats” audio processing, and a “tap to share” feature for transferring URLs, documents and music between the tablet and a phone simply by tapping them together.

When are we going to see these bad boys? An exact date remains to be seen, although the leaked Palm marketing materials suggest both a Wi-Fi and AT&T 3G version of the 7-inch Opal to ship in North America, Europe and China in September of this year. The sheet also lists a 4G Verizon-carried Opal to ship in September, and a 4G AT&T-carried version to come in July of 2012.

HP did not comment on the rumors.

Separate reports have emerged suggesting we could see the 9-inch tablet even sooner. HP will begin shipping Topaz units as early as March, according to sources who told DigiTimes. HP expects to ship somewhere between 45 to 48 million notebooks in 2011, with the webOS-operated tablets being the lion’s share of those numbers.

Before HP acquired Palm last April for $1.2 billion, Palm had tried to reinvigorate its ailing mobile market with webOS-based smartphones like the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi. Since Palm’s acquisition, HP has been trying to move the much-lauded webOS over to HP products like the ill-fated HP Slate.

A September release for HP’s Opal would put HP behind the forthcoming tablet debuts from Motorola, Lenovo and a potential iPad 2 release. But a staggered approach with Topaz’s March shipping date could keep HP up to speed with its competitors, and keep us puzzled with yet another tablet to choose from in the spring.

Photo: webOS interface/HP

See Also:

• HP Buys Palm for $1.2 Billion
• Palm webOS Headed to HP Tablet, Printer
• HP Slate Could Get a Makeover With Palm’s WebOS
• HP Slate Details Leaked: $550 Netbook, Minus Keyboard

The iPad StudioDock from Alesis is a protective case that lets musicians hook up pretty much everything they might need to the stage-friendly tablet: microphones, PA speakers, MIDI controllers and monitors or projectors. In short, it pretty much replaces a computer for performers.

These days, even a busker in the street is likely to have a computer as part of their setup, but a laptop isn’t great for the task: the battery-life sucks, the interface requires a fiddly trackpad or a keyboard, and it is both delicate (don’t spill your beer!) and bulky. An iPad, on the other hand, has a stoned-guitarist-friendly touch-interface and now, thanks to the Studio Dock, can do almost as much as the ubiquitous MacBook.

As well as working with most MIDI apps in the App Store, the dock will work with most peripherals. You get two quarter-inch XLR sockets, phantom power, a guitar input, a pair of quarter-inch jack outputs, headphone jack, RCA composite (for video), plus MIDI in and out, USB MIDI and finally, a jack for a foot-switch.

The only things not known are the price, or when you can buy it. I imagine this is going to have a lot of musicians very excited. This could make the iPad the Atari ST of the ‘tens.

StudioDock [Alesis via Mac Stories]

See Also:

• Bluetooth Sheet Music Turner Could Help Readers With Disabilities …
• Gallery: Best New Gear for Musicians, Fans
• iDJ Live Could Unleash Your Inner Mixmaster
• Let There Be Rock: Digital Guitar Better Than The Real Thing …
• M-Audio Refreshes MIDI Controller Line

Who could have guessed, in January 2011, that we would publish 453 stories on Apple’s yet-to-be-announced iPad?

And yet that’s the number we did publish, and four people guessed exactly that number.

A little over a year ago, we challenged you to guess how many stories we’d publish in 2010 on the topic of Apple’s forthcoming tablet.

We knew it was a hot topic: Every story we’d written to that date on an “Apple tablet” got tons of attention, and lots of comments (both pro and con). We’d seen tantalizing rumors, and figured it would either be a hot product or a spectacular flop. We knew we’d be writing a lot of stories on the topic to meet the demand for information on it.

Little did we know that we’d average about 2 stories for every workday.

We received over 10,000 entries for the contest. Guesses ranged from 0 to 99999999999999999999 (followed by a lot more nines). There were some nerdy guesses too, like 3.14159 and 6.0221415 × 10²³. There were some snarky answers, like “365*x where x=# tablets sold” and “0 (i hope).” Someone even tried to inject a function in order to capitalize on the wisdom of the crowd, with an entry that read: =AVERAGE(A2:A1000)+1. Sorry, that formula did not compute.

Eliminating the truly absurd guesses (anything over 10,000), the average of all remaining guesses was 309. Not too far from the actual number, but not nearly close enough for the averaging function to have worked in any case.

To count the number of iPad stories, I used a Google search to find all stories published on Wired.com from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2010 that included “iPad” in the title. I turned off any content filtering and told Google to show me all the duplicates.

Searching on the titles was the easiest objective way to determine if the iPad was a major focus for the story, and not just something mentioned in passing.

In addition, because the name “iPad” was only used after Apple’s iPad unveiling on Jan. 27, 2010, I also did a search for stories with “Apple tablet” in the name published from January 1 to January 30, 2010.

I put both search results into a spreadsheet, sorted by name, and eliminated duplicates as well as any automatically-generated category and tag pages.

The resulting total was 453. I found four entrants who had guessed that number, so used a random-number generator to pick between them. I did so blind: The columns showing any personally-identifying information were hidden from the moment the contest started. It was only after picking the winner that I revealed the columns containing his name.

And so our winner is Mike Gorman.

Mike, you’ll be getting an iPad from Wired. Congratulations.

Photo credit: Robert Occhialini/Flickr

All photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Along with the restoration of the hardware screen-orientation lock, the new iOS 4.3 beta for iPad adds new multitouch gestures to quickly switch between apps. Using four or five fingers, you can now swipe up to show the multitasking bar, and swipe left or right to switch between apps.

But it is a third gesture which is fueling speculation. If you pinch with your whole hand, you return to the home screen, no home-button press required. This, along with rumors supplied to the Boy Genius Report, has people wondering if the home button will be removed from iPad 2 and iPhone 5:

[We] are told that Apple, at some point in time, will remove the home button from the iPad’s design. Instead of button taps, you will use new multitouch gestures to navigate to the home screen and also to launch the app switcher.

Think about that for a second. With the current iPad (or iPhone), you can hand it to Aunt Flora and she’ll work out how to use the thing in a few moments. The single button does one thing* – returns you to the home screen, providing a notional reset for the user. At the very worst, if Aunt Flora gets stuck you can call across the room “Press the button. The only button.”

Compare this to a buttonless design. How will Aunt Flora work out how to get back to the home screen? Who would ever think to try a five-fingered pinch? And how would you even do that one-handed on an iPhone? I’ll bet that even you, tech-savvy reader that you are, has never tried a five-finger pinch on your iPad.

My guess is that the button will stay, despite Apple’s obvious hatred for buttons in general. I can’t wait to try those gestures, though.

*Sure, the home button also pulls up the multitasking bar, and helps with screenshots, but Aunt Flora will probably never use those, either.

Video of New Multi-Touch Gestures on iPad iOS 4.3 [MacRumors]

Apple will remove home button on next iPad and iPhone [Boy Genius Report]