I was not convinced the iPhone interface would work at the time. I mean, a phone keyboard is pretty small, and I like entering numbers without looking at the keys.

Then I remembered I often phone someone not by manually entering the number but by looking up a list.

So a tablet could work for stuff like web browsing or book reading. I would make it smaller than the tablets I saw some years ago though. You would want something netbook/kindle sized.

The touchscreen interface is only as good as the software makes it. In time, touchscreens will become a standard element of the human computer interface as a compliment to the keyboard. This will happen when the app builders start taking the touch interface seriously.

When it comes to text entry, the keyboard will continue to rule until voice-recog can work without headsets and precisely positioned mics.

It's more helpful to think of touch as a pen and mouse replacement rather than a keyboard replacement.

It is a story that Apple has heard before.

And yet...before the iPod all music players were crap, before the iPhone all smartphones were crap. Do you see where I am going with this?

Apple will build an iTablet PRECISELY because all previous efforts by others have been failures. The difference is that Apple will create it right.

So who will use it?

....couch potatoes
....school children (their textbooks will be on it)
....the military (troops with electronic maps)
....airline pilots (electronic flight manuals)
....hospitals (patient bedside records)
....couch potatoes

Did I mention couch potatoes?

Yes, the tablet form-factor can be done right. Meaning right size, decent screen, light-weight, good performance and decent set of features, long battery life,and cost effective-reasonably priced.

It should do all the iphone can do minus voice, ie use Google Voice with BT headset, support Apple wireless keyboard. (There is a good reason why iPhone does still not support it!!!, now you know...). Patrick Norton said it before and I wanted that compatibility the first week I got the iPhone 2G.
Do all that the Kindle can do. Be a great Internet tablet with nice, new nifty multitouch corner gestures. Some handwriting recognition for the Newton loyalists. To do this, Atom is a FAIL cpu but a A9 Cortex like a PA Semi rendition would cut it nicely. So I am expecting a revolutionary netbook that is not really a netbook but all those netbook people will gladly ditch for the iTablet. OSX iPhone with Mac like extensions would be just right for this platform. So I figured the OS is an iPhone OSX with SL extensions, basically a customized SL with iPhone OSX compatibility.

I'm an engineering student and I don't know what I'd do without my HP TX tablet. I can annotate lecture notes, draw diagrams, write maths equations easily, make all of my work instantly redundant + I have unlimited files, folders & ink to work with.

I haven't touched a peice of paper for about 2 years.

Yeah, the HP TX series, and now the TX2 series are great.

Mine serves as the base station for my home entertainment (music and video), portable gaming machine (RTS games benefit hugely from pen input devices) as well as serving at role-playing games as my character sheet :)

And of course it can do everything a normal laptop can.

The only downside of them is the crappy 5400rpm HDD, only 2GB ram and the vista premium.

Toss in a 500G 7200rpm seagate, an extra 2GB of ram and windows 7 ultimate 64 and you have a missile of a machine :)

A simple touchscreen that uses color "E-ink"(in quotes because it's a patented name. Also, not technically invented yet, though things are in the pipe), and a Wifi connection that lets a nearby computer do most of the heavy lifting.

Enlighten me here, which would be better if you assume everything happens in the same location? A touchscreen that does it's own computation or a touchscreen that utilizes wifi to let a nearby computer do it's complex stuff?

It's nice to be able to hold something in your hand to manipulate stuff better, but how far do you need to move? If it's office work and you can save a thousand or so dollars by only using it in the office, aren't there people that would find that appealing?

They have a chance to succeed, because they are building a Tablet, not a TabletPC with the enormous hardware and software overhead implied.

I always wondered why Palm didn't build a Din A5-sized version of their products. They had all the components to build a resources-light tablet.

...not web tablets, unless Apple really screws this one up.

Apple's been missing the opportunity to get every art student on the planet to buy something like this for years - ever since the [Wacom-backed] tablet PCs came out and proved a full computer could ship for the price of the Wacom 'display' alone. A price point more towards $1,000 than $300 would be pretty reasonable if it actually has the sensitivity to do fine artwork - but they'll have made an expensive mistake if they're counting on 'multi-touch' and all it's good for is fingerpainting.

I use a tablet since two years. Actually I got one few months after I heard about them.
For an engineer those things rock. You can scratch notes during meetings, draw sketches etc. - everything you need to bring your idea to a digital format FAST. Try it with normal laptop...
It's also much more comfortable to use during web surfing, reading documents etc.

Tablets are absolutely awesome and I suspect as prices go down they will get more popular. I would love something like an acer timeline 13,3" with CULV 2*1.6ghz cpu and tablet functionality.

There are some very affordable HP TX machines, but AMD laptop cpus are unfortunetly quite hot and power hungry.

I'm pretty sure I read a comment above that said artists could really use a mac tablet. Artists! That's where it's at. If we could all just learn to be artists the world would be a better place. As good a laugh as I've had in a while.

This question seems to me like nerds discussing the usability of a lipstick. Think in a bunch of girls whirling for hours around Facebook to see their friends photos or Youtube to see little music movies or Windows Messenger to type long messages like "hi","lv u","bye" and eventually saing (not typing) things like "hey, my iTablet color combines with my hair", etc. The planet Earth has billions of humanoids like this! And in some years in the future they will say: Keyboard? What is a keyboard?

yeah its true, what ever apple makes the fanboys just do what ever it takes to have it even if its not that useful..the good thing with apple they have more than 10 million fanboys...(count me out im a pc guy) for sure this tablet will be succesful, coz most fanboys will love it and apple controlled media would be so gaga about it that millions of apple gadgets have been sold.

i would bet a thousand bucks that they can sell a million units in just a 6 months. but i would bet 10 grand if not more than 30% of those buyers are new mac users.

Rafe Needleman published his August 4, 2009 3:40 and this was published August 5, 2009 12:32 and they do sound ridiculously alike when you read them both right after one another. Is it really plagiarism if the info is somewhat reconstructed and its news rather than literature? Just asking, I'm no plagiarism expert.

This article sounds eerily like this one over at CNet:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-10303158-250.html

Coincidence that two articles on Apple tablet appear on the same day with the same talking points? or plagiarism?

The question shouldn't be "why would anyone want a tablet".. the questions should be "Why would anyone want an iPhone when you can get a tablet?" or "Why would anyone want a laptop when you can get a tablet?" or "Why would anyone want a keyboard when you can use a tablet with your desktop to interface it instead?"

The reality is the Tablet is the better interface in theory.. the problem is that the technology hasn't been there in the past. The success of the iPhone seems to indicate it's there now.

I need to know who does pr for Crunchpad, all the journos mention them, and they are only a smallish in a big pond, with nothing particularly interesting.

The Smart Q7 (7" screen) is a $200 Linux + Windows mobile tablet. Alwaysinnovating.com have a 9" tablet with optional keyboard+battery that turns it into a true netbook. Pixel Qi have announced a screen that combines the qualities of LCD (colour, fast refresh rate) and e-Ink (reflexivity, battery life) -you get to switch at will between one mode or the other-.

That's where the tablet action is at. Not with yet another iTune player, nor braindead "we couldn't make software for it" web browser..

Maybe a niche, but artists could definetly use a well designed tablet computer that doesn't cost an arm and a leg (Axiotron).
Apple has shunned their designer-oriented roots for a while now anyway, concentrating mostly on consumer products such as iPods - now would be a good time to refresh the Mac as a serious graphic design platform, and what better way to do it than with a pressure sensitive tablet mac? At least I'd buy one.

This article reads like a feeble attempt to start a flame war. Any depth of thought about what works and what doesn't? Confusion of Apple's motivations and those of the rumour mill? Analysis of where the rumours come from and what they actually refer to? Any speculation about how a new product might break the mould to make it successful?

C'mon, you can do better! But then I'm an optimist.

All I can say is HP TX series

if they can get the UI down it might sell. Not to me but there are some people that'll buy it.. probably

My doctor uses one, and it seems to work out okay for him. Easier to take notes during exam than typing.

It's a niche product.

Let wait to see how this one will pan out. There is definite potential for such a device if done properly.

A final point: who says a tablet device strictly cannot have a keyboard?????