Update post iPad release:
OK - I totally failed on this flight of fancy.
A few interesting conversations and email threads came together today to spark some new ideas concerning the upcoming Apple announcement (currently January 27 2010).
They started me thinking that one possibility for a tablet model would be as an iPhone accessory. I'm thinking about a tablet that you physically dock your iPhone into. The tablet provides an outboard GPU for driving the increased screen real estate and possibly leans on the
Grand Central Dispatch and
OpenCL libraries so that it would also perform as an adjunct CPU. It was thinking about OpenCL that made me think that its real promise is less in desktop applications, but more in affording a simple means of giving highly concentrated computing capacity at relatively low power to devices that have (by today's desktop standards) an anemic CPU.
This would probably depend on the next version of the iPhone OS to port the code over from Snow Leopard. So here's a real prediction: iPhone OS 3.2 or 4.0 will be previewed, at the very least to get the developers ready with a beta SDK. Whatever happens if there's a new screen announced we'll be needing a new SDK.
This architecture also adresses an issue that Apple has with their US telco partner AT&T who (despite promises) still doesn't permit tethering. If my iPhone remains the point of contact with the GSM network, technically I'm not tethering to an external device.
This approach may seem a little silly (and probably is, I'm just blue-sky free-associating based on a few conversations that happened today) and might only represent one possible flavor of tablet. In this configuration, the tablet might be useless without an iPhone (or iPod Touch), but I was also thinking about the progress that's been made in some of the Chrome style netbooks where the entire OS is simply a browser and Apple's excellent javascript libraries for developing iPhone and WebKit applications. A webkit browser in the firmware would provide a minimal application platform for autonomous use when the iPhone is undocked.
Now an iPhone accessory like this would have been a ridiculous idea even a year ago, but now Apple already has a potential client base of 30 million iPhone users as of march 2009 and 2009 has been a banner year for Apple. For simplicity's sake, I think we'd best restrict this to the 3G and 3GS form factor for a uniform docking interface.
So I can see a tablet coming in a few different forms/models :
1. A dumb tablet with no onboard smarts at all, you have to pop your iPhone in to make it work. But it provides additional battery capacity, a GPU to boost your computing capacity and the ability to handle larger graphic formats. You'll need some kind of tablet based storage, perhaps even applications that are automatically made accessible when the iPhone docks like other iPhone hardware accessories. From iTunes, you can select the destination of certain media types and you would have tablet-optimized applications that install on the tablet's internal storage. Additional hardware features that are furnished to the iPhone would be 802.11n networking so that you can stream (or at least acquire in a reasonable amount of time) 720p video (which is conveniently the format also used on the Apple TV and the iTunes store).
Or it may be even more bare bones than that, no internal storage, which will drive the announcement of new 64Gb iPhones.
2. A tablet that is minimally functional without the iPhone installed that uses a Chrome style webkit-based OS embedded in upgradeable firmware. You can surf and access javascript based applications directly over a wifi network with a number of built-in applications like an iTunes remote and/or client, basic mail services, the obligatory eBook reader (along with appropriate content provider tie-ins). Left on it's own that would make it pretty much just like every other tablet computer out there which I find an unlikely proposition since it's very much a me-too product and Jobs is clearly not going to enter a market without some means of differentiation.
3. A fully autonomous tablet, with it's own app store for tablet specific apps. This pretty much fails my differentiation test as well, even if the UI is some way super-cool touch 3D holographic Minority Report deal.
If I have an iPhone and a MacBook or some other kind of portable PC, where's the hook? It can be cool and all, but that doesn't provide me with a sufficiently compelling use case to shell out $600-800. If I tried to sell this as my media station for the couch, my wife will tell me (and correctly) that my iPhone and my MacBook are more than sufficient. Watching movies in bed? The MacBook is just fine, plus it has a base to keep the screen vertical. The same arguments for a minimal tablet also apply for a full featured one, with the exception that it would be much more expensive.
Apple does have something nobody else has though, and that's the iPhone. So if I take the tablet as described and I dock my iPhone, suddenly I can run my iPhone applications scaled up, which would be awesome for Fieldrunners, and crappy for Mail.
Applications will need a hybrid option that will allow developers to create a second UI optimized for a tablet style screen when available. In the absence of a tablet UI set of window controls, it simply scales up the iPhone version. This allows everyone to have immediate compatibility, but with an option to evolve at the developers pace.
One particularity about Apple in these two markets is that they have fixed the form of their pocket computing platform. The iPhone has gone two years without any modification to the external form. What other telephone has that kind of consistency? I think that they are convinced that they've hit the sweet spot as far as the form factor goes so there's no point in straying just to satisfy fashion's desire for new shapes. The sales argument is about the applications, not the megapixels of the camera or the glowing trackball. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds, but it's also the cornerstone for building a real platform instead of just a bunch of vaguely related widgets.
The other little thing here is that Apple is the only company that makes both computers and phones with any kind of unified strategy based on a shared core platform, converging media and online services. Samsung, Acer and now DELL all have both phones and computers, but they share nothing more than the corporate logo stuck on the back. The closest that they've come to unifying the computing and telephony worlds is by putting GSM SIM cards in their netbooks.
So there you go - yet another wacky tablet idea to play with. Flights of fancy based on no information are always fun.
Now if I were to step outside of the iPhone idea field, the only thing that I can see Apple doing better than anyone else right now in a multi-touch tablet would be iMovie rebuilt from the ground up again. Which may be part of the package, but again, even if way cool, the bulk of the public is not going to buy one just for that. Hmmm - but back to the 3GS with video - that would rock to be able to really edit right away. Now that it's entered my head, every single idea keeps coming back to iPhone/Tablet synergies...
infrageeks
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