Plus, yeah, textbooks. Let’s face it, I’ll buy one no matter what, I’m just that dumb.

Josh will be bummed out that it doesn’t run Mac OS X 10.6 proper, but there’s no real reason for anything Apple makes to run OS X proper anymore, not really.

I don’t care about industrial strength OSes unless I’m actually creating content. See what S.P. there is saying? What makes communication media tools work now is not just selection of pre-assembled content, but integration with it. And not in some secondary way, but as a primary function.

It looks like the iTablet won’t have a hard keyboard. That means that interactions will all be of the “Sorry from the terseness, posting from my iTablet” variety. It’s wholly conceivable, though, that it’ll allow for a Bluetooth keyboard. And maybe it would have a slot for a MicroSD card for photos. If it has iPhoto (admittedly probably an abbreviate version, but with Flickr/Picasa/etc.* upload integrated) on it, we can start to talk.

*Apple’s online services have always been terrible. I’d say they keep trying and failing, but I’m not sure I’d call any of that “trying”. From eWorld to MobileMe, they’ve all been C-grade.

People’s reading habits have been fundamentally changed by social networks. I don’t (and never did) read any publication cover-to-cover, and although there are a dozen or so sites I actively seek out, a large chunk of my online content consumption is stuff shared by my friends or people I friend/follow/stalk on social networks.

If any of these tablets are going to be useful, they have to allow the user to create content, too, and most of their keyboards suck. My girlfriend has an iPod touch, and there’s a serious learning curve on that thing, because whenever I try to use it I feel like I need a dialing wand.

I think the success of a form-factor like this will hinge upon the idea that something like this can be used as a new form of ‘communicator’ (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, all that junk, maybe with a higher ratio of optimized multimedia content — video Facebook status updates, maybe?) as well as a reader (of web pages, PDFs, eBooks, literally everything), which is something I haven’t seen in any tablet so far.

My guess is that Apple comes along and knocks it out of the park, sometime in the next two months. They’re so blindingly happy with the App Store model — let’s face it, this software distribution model is the one that Jobs has always wanted — so it will run a superset of iPhone/iPod apps; which means it gets Kindle books, but also all the stuff I listed above. Josh will be bummed out that it doesn’t run Mac OS X 10.6 proper, but there’s no real reason for anything Apple makes to run OS X proper anymore, not really.

I think you’re probably right on all counts, but I wonder if they developed (if this is even possible– I am a moron in terms of these things) a template for each issue, or, rather, several and just dropped the stuff in there as needs be, eliminating some of the heavy stuff of making each issue. Is that even a possibility?

I kind of want this to be, but… I think you’re right: I have it all in front of me on my laptop. And even though I have many fond memories of poring over an SI as a kid for *hours*, I can’t imagine spending that time with a reader, I just can’t. Not in the same way, anyway. Well, off to look at Facebook for an hour!

We’ll see, indeed! Great post!