After Wednesday’s barrage of Apple tablet rumors from media outlets big and small, Wired.com is convinced the long-awaited product will see the light of day in 2010. But there is one more thing.
New York Times writer Nick Bilton adds to the rumor frenzy with two sound bites from Apple staff.
“I can’t really say anything, but, let’s just say Steve is extremely happy with the new tablet,” a current senior Apple employee is quoted in Bilton’s post.
Bilton also cites a recently departed Apple employee who said, “You will be very surprised how you interact with the new tablet.”
Intriguing, especially the second quote. Just how could the interaction method surprise us? In August 2008, a 52-page patent filed by Apple described how a touchscreen tablet might work. The patent described a device that would be able to detect simultaneous touches and gestures from two hands. But that hardly sounds like it would be surprising.
Interestingly, AppleInsider spotted a new patent application that was appeared this week in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s database. Filed by Apple, the patent application is titled “Keystroke tactility arrangement on a smooth touch surface.” It describes a tactile-feedback mechanism for a touch surface keyboard to create physical bumps for the user to feel the keys:
One approach is to provide tactile feedback mechanisms, such as dots, bars, or other shapes on all or many keys. In another embodiment, an articulating frame may be provided that extends when the surface is being used in a typing mode and retracts when the surface is used in some other mode, e.g., a pointing mode. The articulating frame may provide key edge ridges that define the boundaries of the key regions or may provide tactile feedback mechanisms within the key regions. The articulating frame may also be configured to cause concave depressions similar to mechanical key caps in the surface. In another embodiment, a rigid, non-articulating frame may be provided beneath the surface. A user will then feel higher resistance when pressing away from the key centers, but will feel a softer resistance at the key center.
Could that be the big surprise? It would certainly be a welcome addition to eliminate the need to stare at the keyboard while typing. And one could imagine it would be a crucial feature on a touchscreen device with a bigger screen.
Apple plans to demonstrate its touchscreen tablet at a January event, multiple independent reports suggest.
Sources have told Financial Times, Business Insider and Boy Genius Report different pieces of information that, when added together, indicate Apple is preparing a special event to show off the tablet next month.
The most detailed report comes from Financial Times, whose sources claim Apple will hold an event Tuesday, Jan. 26 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco — a venue where Apple has held its previous iPod events. The topic of the event is unknown, but Financial Times speculates it will center on the tablet.
The Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer cites a “plugged-in source in the mobile industry” who said Apple has contacted select developers to ready a higher-resolution version of their apps for a demonstration of the tablet in January.
Wired.com contacted seven developers of popular iPhone apps, who each said they had not received such a note regarding screen resolution from Apple.
One major iPhone developer, Raven Zachary of Small Society, told Wired.com he had to “ignore media requests pertaining to Apple rumors or confidentiality.” (Small Society helped develop the popular Zipcar iPhone app, which was demonstrated at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June.)
Boy Genius Report cites an “amazingly accurate” source who is confident that there will be a 7-inch model of the Apple tablet. The vast majority of rumor reports regarding the tablet have described the product as a 10-inch version of the iPhone or iPod Touch. Boy Genius Report’s source hints that there may be two models. The source also said the tablet would be announced January.
In September, Wired.com compiled a roundup of multiple rumor reports regarding an Apple tablet. The consensus was that Apple was preparing a 10-inch touchscreen tablet running the iPhone OS. Several anonymous sources have said the product will have a strong focus on competing with e-book readers such as the Amazon Kindle.
The most credible report to date came from iLounge in late September, whose source said Apple was aiming to announce a touchscreen tablet no later than Jan. 19. iLounge established a solid track record after accurately leaking iPod models prior to their launch. Opposing Boy Genius Report, iLounge’s source said in September that a 7-inch tablet had been tested but was judged to be too small, so the latest version had a 10.7-inch screen.
Apple did not immediately respond to Wired.com’s request for comment regarding the event.
Condé Nastwas the first publisher to show off a concept video demonstrating a magazine digitally repurposed for a touchscreen tablet, using Wired as an example. Time Warner followed with a concept tablet edition of Sports Illustrated. And now Bonnier, the company that owns Popular Science, has produced a tablet concept video as well.
Codenamed Mag+, Bonnier’s video prototype (above) looks stunning. Rather than simply digitizing entire magazine pages, the concept software allows you to scroll up and down blocks of text. That gives more space and emphasis to artwork, which is true to the magazine experience.
Of course, this is all vaporware until we see a manufacturer deliver a successful tablet product (cough, Apple). For now, we can appreciate that magazines are thinking hard about the future of publishing, and these are some awesome ideas.
Posted by a French blog, the video above purporting to leak Apple’s touchscreen tablet is obviously a fake, but it’s fun to watch anyway. Check it out yourself and tell us if you can spot the stuff giving away its phoniness.
Staying loyal to his roots, Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak said he would purchase an Apple tablet next year, assuming it ever ships.
Wozniak, who is now a chief scientist of storage company Fusion-io, said during a conference he’d buy an Apple tablet no matter what.
“If there is such a thing,” he said of the rumored Apple tablet. “I buy everything Apple comes out with.”
Attention, Segway: Here’s a prime opportunity for you to get started on a remote control app for the Segway. Charge $1,000 for it, and Woz will probably buy a copy for himself and each member of his Segway polo team.
From the webcast yesterday, the JooJoo (previously named Crunchpad) seemed flimsy and barely working. But now that we spent a good deal of hands on time with it, we can say that Fusion Garage executed an internet tablet quite well.
Specs
Here are some new facts I gathered from the meeting. First, the device runs a 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB RAM. The guys at JooJoo said they weren’t ready to reveal specs yet, but I saw the bootup sequence—a standard BIOS setup that displayed what it was booting to—and saw the specs. Chandra, CEO of Fusion Garage, says that the demo hardware was basically the final hardware, so it’s easy to put two and two together.
As for the graphics card + CPU combination, it’s probably an Nvidia Ion chipset. They claim that it handles 1080p YouTube video fine—we only got to see a few seconds of 720p and 1080p HD YouTube video because the internet connection was acting up—so it’s probably an Ion. But the HD video we tested looked just fine on its 12-inch, 1366×768 resolution screen. Again, the Ion chipset is just an educated guess, but there are few other hardware options that can handle 1080p video smoothly, and an Atom CPU by itself (which we did see) can’t do it on its own.
There is a headphone jack, a microphone jack, a built-in webcam at 1.3 megapixels, a charging port and a USB slot. The external card slot present in the prototype isn’t going to make it to the final version, but they are thinking of making it available to put a 3G card in there in the future. No TV out/HDMI out yet, but they are thinking about that. There are built-in speakers for playing back audio without headphones, and they’re decent enough that you can actually listen to them, but you’ll want to plug them in to speakers for any kind of extended video consumption.
Performance
The tablet actually handled pretty well, with browsing web pages, transitioning between tabs (windows) and opening up new web pages working fine. There’s an accelerometer in there to detect between vertical and horizontal orientations.
The body is solid, sturdy and graced with a bright 12-inch screen. The back is curved and made of a plastic that feels nice in your hand, and the whole thing doesn’t seem too heavy to prop up on a bed or a toilet.
In short, it’s an actual web browsing tablet that you’d be perfectly fine using.
The software
The entire system is basically a gateway to your browser, which is based off WebKit, the same code that powers Safari and Google’s Chrome. It’s fast, and handles gestures (pinching to go back a level, swiping to move up and down) just fine. There are other gestures that will be included in the final build, like two finger swiping for going back and forth in history and a bookmark swipe, but we didn’t get to see that. But, you can’t zoom into text. That’s partially because the pinching is already used for going in and out of your windows into the home screen, but also partially because the screen is 12 inches. You don’t need to really zoom into text on a laptop-sized screen of 12 inches. And they also said they may make LARGER sized tablets as well, with 12 being their smallest size.
JooJoo’s keyboard looks like this, and takes up only a portion of the screen. It’s usable, but you don’t want to use it to bang out a blog post; this is mainly for consuming media.
Fusion Garage’s concept for the product is that the “internet is the application”, which means you can’t save photos or files locally and you can’t access any of the 4GB of storage to do any user level stuff. The most you can dictate is how much each internet application (e.g. Gmail or Google Wave) can have for a local cache.
It does support Flash as usual, except when you play HD Flash it’ll force you into fullscreen mode to render better/faster. And if you want to read PDFs, it’ll force you into Google’s web-based PDF doc reader. So it handles PDFs, but not “natively”.
Your home screen is composed almost entirely of icons—shortcuts—to web applications. The screen is customizable with your own applications, eventually, and has a weird feature where it displays a different color background whenever you go back to it. Fusion Garage is thinking of taking this out, or swapping it with some other feature.
As for multitasking, Fusion Garage says that they will have specific APIs available to webapps to incorporate in order to pass notifications up to the user. For example, if Twitter refreshes in another window and you’re watching a YouTube video, a popup will show and tell you you have something else going on. The APIs will be available at launch, but it’s up to websites to support them.
How good is it?
Despite its weird birth issues this past week with all the Arrington trouble, the JooJoo is surprisingly solid. You can tell Fusion Garage spent a good deal of time polishing the hardware, by the fact that they managed to include a 12-inch screen that’s decent enough to not have lousy viewing angles, plus support 1080p HD video playback.
The only trouble right now is software, which is only about 75% done. Fusion Garage plans to ship devices about 8-10 weeks after preorders, which start this friday. If FG can manage to finish the software and get it to a point where it’s transparent to the user who just wants to get online, $500 isn’t too outrageous a price to pay. Decent netbooks are around that price, and it’s about the price you’d expect Apple to charge for their tablet, if not even more. We’d of course be very happy if it were down at $300 or $400, but it’s basically a new device in a new market, and you’ll have to hand over a little extra for being an early adopter.
So right now we’re at a wait and see status. The JooJoo seems good, from our time with it, but it really needs to be taken home and thoroughly tested with different webapps, watching a lot of HD video and streaming music. At the very least, we’ll see how much of that 5-hour battery life stands up to constant use. You can pre-order it yourself this Friday, but, since there’s some legal troubles on the horizon, you probably want to wait until the whole thing clears up first before putting any money down. [JooJoo]
Wired’s parent company Conde Nast isn’t the only publisher taking touchscreen tablets seriously. Time Warner wants to get in on the game, too. The video above shows off its concept tablet treatment of Sports Illustrated, packed with interactive videos and graphics to create an addictive media experience. We’re impressed.
Meanwhile, while we’re still in iTablet fantasy land, Digg.com’s latest episode of Diggnation makes some allusions to Apple’s rumored touchscreen tablet. Co-host Alex Abrecht claims he has inside knowledge on the pricing: “I was shocked at how cheap the price point is going to be.” But he offers nothing more beyond that. See that video below.
A recently published patent from Apple depicts pen-based handwriting recognition software that would work with tablet-like devices.
The described invention (screenshot at right) demonstrates a method to make digital handwriting recognition better than technologies used in the past. An “ink manager” would attempt to recognize full phrases before sending them to the handwriting recognition engine, as opposed to sending separate strokes.
“The present invention, in large part, relates to the observation that client applications and handwriting recognition software in pen-based computer systems can make far more accurate ink-related decisions based on entire ink phrases, rather than individual ink strokes,” the patent states.
Though the patent relates the technology to traditional tablet devices, we doubt we would see it applied to Apple’s touchscreen tablet, which is rumored for an early 2010 release. Tipsters in several reports have described the rumored tablet as a 10.7-inch iPhone.
Assuming Apple’s tablet is indeed a larger iPhone, it’s unlikely it will feature a stylus-based interface since the iPhone was designed for finger interaction. It’s odd, actually, for Apple to be thinking about pen-based computing. Steve Jobs in January 2007 denounced the stylus when introducing the iPhone at Macworld Expo:
Oh, a stylus, right? We’re going to use a stylus. No. Who wants a stylus? You have to get ‘em and put ‘em away, and you lose ‘em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s not use a stylus. We’re going to use the best pointing device in the world. We’re going to use a pointing device that we’re all born with — born with ten of them. We’re going to use our fingers. We’re going to touch this with our fingers.
A stylus-controlled Apple product, tablet or not, would severely undercut Jobs’ statement now, wouldn’t it?
We haven’t even seen the Zii EGG make its long-anticipated consumer debut yet, but Creative is already building up steam for its next Zii venture. ZiiLABS’ ZMS-08 is a third generation mobile media accelerator / system-on-a-chip that boasts its predecessor’s 1080p playback and 24fps encoding, and HD video conferencing via simultaneous 720p encoding and decoding, while adding all-new OpenGL ES 2.0 support, an integrated HDMI controller, X-Fi audio and Flash acceleration. Paired to a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8, and running a custom flavor of Android alongside Plaszma OS, the new Zii chip will look for homes in “web tablets, netbooks, connected TVs” and the like, but seemingly not smartphones. ZiiLABS has already signed up a number of clients, who’ll start receiving shipments in Q1 of 2010. Full PR and an architectural diagram after the break.
Rumored for an early 2010 release, Apple’s touchscreen tablet is shaping up to be one of the most anticipated gadgets since the iPhone. But words aren’t doing it justice. Tipsters have described the device as a “giant iPhone” of sorts, which doesn’t sound terribly exciting. That’s why Wired.com challenged readers to mock up illustrations of an Apple tablet for a chance to win prizes.
The contest rules were simple: Use your digital design powers to dream up an Apple tablet and submit your illustrations to our Reddit widget. We’re rewarding prizes for two categories: Most Realistic Mock-Up, for the most realistic, convincing illustration of an Apple tablet based on the consensus of various rumor reports; and Most Creative Mock-Up, for some swanky art depicting an Apple tablet that we all really want.
We received 18 tablet illustrations from participants, and we’re presenting 10 of our favorites to you in this awesome art gallery created by readers. Click through for the winners and some amusing visuals.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Interestingly, AppleInsider spotted a new patent application that was appeared this week in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s database. Filed by Apple, the patent application is titled “Keystroke tactility arrangement on a smooth touch surface.” It describes a tactile-feedback mechanism for a touch surface keyboard to create physical bumps for the user to feel the keys:
