Apple Tablet Blue Sky Theorizing

The rumour that wouldn't die is making the rounds stronger than ever this month so I thought I'd throw my two cents into the ring.

From a practical perspective, I find that the idea of the netbook or tablet computer in the 10" screen size a bit limiting since it's not pocketable. I have really noticed that the biggest difference that the iPhone brings to the table is the 100% availability. It's always in a pocket and the internet is always there (network willing, of course).

Moving to a tablet format or netbook style machine brings almost all the same overhead as a 13" notebook computer. You need a bag with a handle to haul it around. The complement is that even with the best battery life out there, you probably want to make sure that you've also got a power brick in the bag. So by going to a 10" design I've incurred all of the same overhead that I'm dealing with using the 13" or 15" MacBook Pro. What's the point? While it hasn't gone totally unremarked, I think that the most important aspect of the iPhone in this space is the ubiquity of access and use.

Hmmmm

So I see two possible axes of development for Apple in this space - one that's highly unlikely and the other that seems more achievable. The blue sky dreaming version is that the tablet can fold down to a pocketable size, but given the current state of the art in flexible, capacitive OLED screens I find this highly unlikely.

So this leaves basically some kind of Apple netbook or tablet device. The only difference I can see between these two markets is whether the device has an integrated keyboard or not. Now the iPhone is perfectly designed for touch use which is (as we have discovered) ideal for a pocketable device when tied to an optimized UI, eliminating the need for stylii and keeping a maximum of screen real estate usable.

That said, once that you move out of the pocketable space, the lack of a physical keyboard becomes a limitation. On top of that issue we have the elephant in the room which is handwriting recognition - once seen as being the definitive signature of any computer deemed a tablet. AFAIK, there are no netbooks that are tablets according to the currently accepted definition.

Apple dissed the stylus as an input device for the iPhone - with good reason as the point is the speed of access - out of the pocket, swipe and you're running. A tablet or portable has a completely different usage profile. So will Apple bring the stylus back to the table? Writing with your finger tip is not an option. The ergonomics and precision are just not up to the task. Inkwell already exists and is being used by Axiotron for their MacBook tablet retrofits.

Can a touch screen be both truly resistive and capacitive at the same time? The Blackberry Bold is a terrible example of this, but I'm not sure if it's truly resistive or if it's just a whole surface click tied to the location of the capacitive selected item. I'm wondering here about mixed mode touch and stylus input possibilities. Or will we have stylii that emulate the end of your finger like the Pogo Stylus?

What will the OS look like?

Here we have a number of running debates basically between a bigger iPhone to a smaller OS X. My take is that Apple is going to go the hybrid route, with melding of the best features of the Newton, Mac OS X and the iPhone. Apple has demonstrated clearly that they are not interested in simply porting an existing UI paradigm to another platform. As we've seem with the iPhone, you start with a core OS and standardized APIs and then you build the UI in such a manner that it's optimized for the environment and the limitations of methods available for interaction.

Simply making a bigger iPhone or a smaller OS X would just be duplicating the exact situation that Microsoft has been pushing with their tablet platform for over a decade. Each form factor requires an UI adapted to it's particular quirks. A tablet aimed at the student market for textbooks and note taking will probably be used in a predominantly touch/stylus type of interaction. One aimed at the mediapad would be almost exclusively touch oriented, but the downside would be limited input options (back to the software keyboard. Touch typing on a software keyboard is not going to work. The moment that anything shifts, you're typing gibberish. Not to mention that holding a flat 10" device on your lap is not really conducive to a decent typing experience.

Or is Apple simply going to ignore the outraged touch typists of the world and drag us kicking and screaming to a Star Trek style hunt and peck style input paradigm? The QWERTY keyboard is more of a habit of the last 20 years of this new "computer" thing so it's quite possible that we may be moving to the next stage and the next religious war will be fought over the physical vs the software keyboard.

The other issue that comes in here is that a keyboard (software or otherwise) works best when the object you're holding is stable relative to you or is posed somewhere. Holding a 10" device with both hands to do BlackBerry style thumb typing strikes me as being very tiring. Not to mention that the additional width becomes more of a problem than an advantage. Reaching across a capacitive screen to the keys in the middle is going to make for a lot of taps on the wrong keys.

Vocal input has often been seen as the holy grail for this type of mobile computing, but I already hear enough people's private cell phone conversations. I don't need to hear their conversations with their computers as well.

Additional use cases

We often think of the idea of the tablet computer as an autonomous flat screen device with the possibility of wireless accessories (like keyboards!) but what if there are different modes of operation? A docked environment that holds the tablet vertically on a desktop here it becomes a small screen attached to wired or wireless devices? You pick it up and it becomes the mediapad with limited input possibilities more like the iPhone where the primary objective is media consumption (be it books, music, video, games, etc).

The big question of this style of device is whether it will be designed to be a satellite device to a base computer like the iPhone/iPod devices or whether it is oriented as being a primary device itself. This question boils down to whether your primary iTunes library can live on this device and you can sync your iPhone to it or whether it syncs to your desktop as a client device.

Or will it truly be a stepping stone hybrid device that lives between the two? A full fledged iTunes application that can be synced to a master library and yet sync down to an iPod as well?

Where are the apps?

Currently nothing has been published to developers to give them a heads up so they can start developing for the mythical new platform (at least outside of the super secret NDA agreements that Apple likes to show at Keynotes). In light of the rampaging success of the app store (despite much of the current developer polemic), I don't think that Apple would ever consider launching anything in this space without tying it into the App Store. I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that any tablet device will be able to run iPhone applications which will auto scale up to the tablet screen size as an interim solution. This would give the new device access to the huge App library out of the gate. A new tablet profile would permit developers to target this as a separate platform to applications optimized to the increased screen real estate, physical keyboard input as well as stylus input.

In closing

It's clear that I don't have any of the answers, but I hope that the questions have been thought provoking.