TechLahore

The Apple Tablet - I'll buy it! (Image courtesy Gizmodo.com)

Generally speaking, I don’t like Apple. I’ve made that pretty clear. That said, there is one Apple product I am interested in. And yes, if they come out with it soon enough, I’ll buy it. If you haven’t guessed already, that product is the yet-unnamed Apple Tablet.

True, the Apple Tablet has been a famed beast of legend for over a year now. Much has been written about it, but little has been seen. Stories emerged recently that Apple may have actually built prototypes of tablets as far back as 2003, only to kill the project when it became clear the alphas didn’t work well. It was around this time that Steve Jobs’ gave us his, “We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk”, spiel.

There are many rumours, but not much is known for damn sure about the Apple Tablet yet. Most folks assume it will run the iPhone OS, though earlier on, the jury seemed to be out on whether the machine would be based on OS X. I don’t really care that much either way, since the iPhone OS is an optimized version of OS X and my primary concerns are really the web browser, note taking apps, e-books and of course, email. Email on the iPhone is currently one of its biggest weaknesses. There is no true push, exchange integration is weak, there is no context-sensitive mail arrival notification, attachments are handled poorly (you can’t browse the device and include docs), attachments are not cached on the device when downloaded… and the list goes on. I doubt the mail functionality will improve on the Tablet, but Apple seriously needs to look into their miserably broken mail client. Both the iPhone and the Tablet could potentially benefit.

Those of you who follow TechLahore may know that I was looking forward to the colour version of the Amazon Kindle. If the Apple Tablet comes out soon enough, it may replace the colour Kindle on my, “Things I Must Have” list. Rumours already abound that Apple is targeting the Kindle with their new Tablet, and that would mean a good e-reader application is probably going to be bundled. Yay for that. Barnes and Noble has no love lost for Amazon, and they were looking at doing their own Kindle competitive reader by OEM’ing a design from Plastic Logic. Borders and Barnes and Noble could both be partnership candidates for Apple. Interesting times ahead.

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