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Jan 27
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Apple 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…
