The iTablet…er, the iSlate…er…well, whatever it’s going to be called
As we get closer and closer to that possible date in January when Apple is may tell us about their supposed computer tablet that everyone has heard about but no one has actually verifiably seen, the rumors are flying fast and furious. The idea that this iTablet, iSlate, or whatever it might be called, could be an excellent gaming platform, just makes the juices run even more for us Mac gamers.
So, I thought today I might run a list of the rumors for you so that you too can salivate at the possibilities. Oh, and get yourselves some tissue paper…you might need to do some cleaning up afterwards.
The Apple product announcement for this tablet was originally slated for Tuesday, January 26th, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. That event has now been moved forward to Wednesday, January 27th. BTW, if you read that Fox news article, you’ll note that the writer stated that he’d already chosen the tablet as his favorite gadget of 2009, even though it doesn’t exist yet. Yeah, dude, wouldn’t that be 2010, anyway?
Moving on, the tablet itself won’t be available to ship until March but will include a 10 to 11 inch touch screen with an iPhone OS, and may cost about $1000. Even better, Apple might be unveiling at the same event an iPhone OS 4.0 beta SDK with tablet simulator tools for those who want to practice building/porting apps to the tablet.
We can imagine some possibilities regarding this tablet based on this info. It will probably include at least two, if not three, USB ports, audio, wireless card, Bluetooth, SD card slots, DVD. But we don’t know yet what an iPhone OS 4.0 might provide in terms of graphical quality. Some of the games currently out for the iPhone suffer from a small screen, rather than poor graphical quality. There’s no info on whether this tablet would actually have a graphics card in there for enhanced 3D graphics, etc.
But there are a ton of games that are difficult to put on an iPhone/iPod Touch because of small screen size, or difficulty with input (I’ve talked with developers who complain about games whose input is d-pad or wheel, and that’s really difficult for an iPhone interface). A tablet screen would solve the small screen size, and alternative input mechanisms that allowed for the use of peripherals could solve the input problem.
But this is still all in the speculation phase at this point. And we have another three weeks to wait.
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