Battery and laptop news

Rumor: Apple tablet coming in October for $800

2010-01-29T18:01:00.000-08:00

There’ve been rumors floating around for the past year or so that Apple’s laptop battery answer to the netbook isn’t a tiny clamshell PC at all, but rather a touchscreen tablet that may run a full blow version of OS X, or maybe a souped up version of the iPhone operating system. China Times now says that the tablet is due out in October and that it’ll cost about $800.

At that price, I certainly hope it runs OS X Leopard, and I kind of want it to come with a keyboard too. I don’t care if it’s a tablet-PC style keyboard that can be used in clamshell mode and then folded down under the screen, or if it’s a detachable or slide-out style keyboard. I just can’t see spending $800 on a device that only has an on-screen keyboard Inspiron 1720 battery,Inspiron 1721 battery.

If the report is true, it looks like the Appl tablet will have a roughly 10 inch capacitive touchscreen display with parts supplied by Foxconn, Wintek, and Dynapack.

Based on the price alone, it doesn’t sound like this is necessarily Apple’s answer to netbooks at all. A $800 device doesn’t really compete with $400 netbooks. It sounds like Apple’s attempt to carve out a new netbook-like niche as a third product category that fits somewhere between a smartphone and a full featured laptop or desktop computer. While I don’t imagine Apple would win over a lot of Dell Mini or Asus Eee PC fans with an $800 tablet, I could certainly see some Apple enthusiasts deciding to pick up a tablet for their Apple collections.

Of course, this whole rumor could be bunk and Apple may be working on a $500 product… or on nothing at all Inspiron 2600 battery,Inspiron 2650 battery,Inspiron 5150 battery.

What think you? Would you pay $800 for an Apple tablet? What would it need to have in order to be worth the price? Sound off in the comments.

Do you want a tablet with a cellphone OS?

2010-01-29T17:59:00.000-08:00

Apple laptop battery is almost certainly going to launch a tablet today. It won’t be the first tablet PC to hit the streets. As I mentioned yesterday, companies have been pumping out handheld, touchscreen devices for decades. But the Apple Tablet is probably the most hyped product of the last two years and it should be extraordinarily interesting to see if it (or any product, for that matter) can live up to the hype.

One of the most interesting elements for me is the fact that all signs point to the Apple Tablet running a version of the iPhone operating system. On the one hand, that’s great news because there are over 100,000 apps for the platform that should run smoothly out of the box. And the OS was designed from the ground up to be touchscreen-friendly. And one of the biggest complaints people have had about tablet PCs running Windows XP, Vista, and 7 is that they’re essentially running a desktop OS designed for a mouse and keyboard. Sure, you can slap on some handwriting recognition software and support for a stylus, fingertips, and even multitouch gestures. But the basic paradigm of folders, icons, a start menu, and so forth weren’t designed for touchscreens Inspiron 1501 battery,Inspiron 1520 battery.

But here’s the thing: the iPhone OS wasn’t really designed for a powerful tablet computing experience either. It was designed for a cellphone that fits in your pocket and which is incapable of running many apps that you can use on a full fledged computer.

Now if all you want to do is read web sites, eBooks, magazines, and watch movies and play a few finger-friendly games, that might not be a big problem. But all signs point to the Apple Tablet costing a heck of a lot more than an iPhone, an Amazon Kindle, or any portable media player. So it would have been nice if Apple had designed an OS that was actually suited to a larger, more powerful device. Of course, it’s possible that this is exactly what Apple did. Just because the tablet can run iPhone apps doesn’t mean that the iPhone and iPod Touch will be able to run tablet apps. Maybe we’ll see video editors, office suites, and high quality games that will run on the tablet but not its little cousins.

But Apple isn’t alone in adapting a cellphone OS for its tablet. CES was choc full of companies showing touchscreen tablets running Google Android this year. It seems like in order to compete with Apple, plenty of other companies are thinking like Apple: If Windows was never that popular on tablets Inspiron 1521 battery,Inspiron 1525 battery, why not try a different OS? Preferably one with no licensing cost?

What do you think? Are you interested in touchscreen tablets running cellphone operating systems? Or would you rather Windows, a full-fledged Linux distro like Ubuntu or Fedora, or a brand-new OS designed specifically for 7 to 10 inch tablets?

Bear in mind, all of this might be moot if Apple surprises us in a few hours by announcing something very different from what we’re expecting. But over the last day or so, there’ve been a lot of leaks pointing to a 10 inch tablet running iPhone apps Inspiron 1526 battery.

Apple Tablet won’t be quite like any device on the market today

2010-01-29T17:57:00.001-08:00

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is likely preparing to officially pull the veil off of the worst-and-best kept secret in the tech industry tomorrow with the introduction of some sort of Apple Tablet. You know, unless the company is even better at keeping secrets than we thought and he’s actually unveiling a new space tourism initiative that provides you with one free ticket to a new moon base with the purchase of every iPhone GK479， FK890，Inspiron 1721 battery.

Anyway, it’s likely that the Apple Tablet won’t be quite like any device on the market today. But it’s hardly going to be the first tablet-style device. We’ve been using PDAs, slates, touchscreen phones, and notebooks with convertible touchscreen displays for years. Microsoft has tried to spark interest in the space at least a few times, first by pushing notebooks with full keyboards that can be converted into laptop battery , and most recently with the Origami/UMPC concept for 10 inch and smaller touchscreen tablets, usually sans keyboard.

And while tablets running Windows have never become part of the zeitgeist the way that, say, the iPhone has, there are plenty of tablets already on the market. And there are plenty more on the way, including a number that will run Google’s Android operating system rather than Windows.

There have been plenty of pundits claiming that the Windows paradigm was never right for touchscreen tablets. The concept of folders, a start menu, and so forth work better with a mouse, while a touchscreen works better with a different sort of interface — something Apple figured out when the company designed the UI for the iPhone. But you know what? There are still an awful lot of tablets running Windows, as well as a fair number of happy tablet users Inspiron 1720 battery,Inspiron 1521 battery.

For an overview, check out UMPC Portal, where our buddy Chippy highlights the 46 tablet PCs in his product database.

Apple may or may not be on the verge of revolutionizing the tablet space. But the company is hardly creating it.