Warren Seen

from Apple.

It’s scary, I guessed the form factor to the inch even:

While an OS X based tablet would be cool, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple deliver something in a smaller form factor, say 7″-10″ and geared towards video and the web on the go – bridging the gap between a handheld and a true tablet form factor.

A lot of people don’t seem to get it, but to my way of thinking, a tablet PC the same size as a conventional “notebook” PC has minimal advantages. In fact, it has all the disadvantages of lugging a laptop that size around (owww, my shoulder). I want a tablet I can take with me to crash on the couch, or the coffee shop, or the back garden, so I can catch up on reading email, RSS, websites, which I can do without needing a 50wpm input device like a keyboard. This to me is truly notebook sized, not the 15″ screen “notebook” i have on my desk now.

If it’s larger than a book, then I’ll just take a book instead. There’s your design spec for portability right there.

Now i wonder if it can be hacked to run OS X? Even if it could, it still lacks the sexy Apple industrial design. I’m still holding out hope that Apple will bring something similar to market soon… after all iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, and that proved the naysayers wrong when they said that there was no market and it would flop.

According to PC world, Apple may be considering acquiring Palm (or what’s left of it).

Palm, at least in its early days, also enjoyed the kind of anything-but-Microsoft fan base that has long sustained Apple.

Jobs tried to buy the company in the late nineties, according to the Mercury.
Neither Apple nor Palm has given any sign that there is any basis for the renewed speculation but there are obvious fits between the two companies.

Apple’s Ipod boom can hardly be sustained unless it can head off competition from PDAs and smartphones that can pack music players along with a host a other functions.

Palm itself was slow off the mark in adding tricky telephony technology to its products and Apple would have a hard time starting from scratch in the market.

This would seem to fit in nicely with the recent spate of patents lodged by Apple, which I’ve already talked about here. I can’t see the iPod mutating into a fully fledged handheld, but rather a new device that would include iPod capabilities.

Whatever it turns out to be, it seems something is definitely brewing in Cupertino…

MacRumors is covering recently lodged Apple patents which seem to point towards a keyboard-less interface. I was hoping for an Apple handheld when the Nano was released, sort of a Newton redux, but it never came to pass.

While an OS X based tablet would be cool, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple deliver something in a smaller form factor, say 7″-10″, and geared towards video and the web on the go – bridging the gap between a handheld and a true tablet form factor.

Well I can dream…