The Tablet Cometh: Some thoughts on Apple’s announcement

Next Wed­nes­day, Apple will host one of the most anti­cip­ated tech­no­logy announce­ments of the year, per­haps of this still-fresh decade.

The reas­on for this level of atten­tion is that every­one anti­cip­ates that Apple will re-launch a device that the industry has been try­ing to make work for 20 years — the Tab­let computer.

As some pun­dits pre­dict, this could be the thin-edge-of-the-wedge that will change the pub­lish­ing industry. Think eBooks, news­pa­pers and magazines:

If the tab­let does emphas­ize ebooks the way ana­lysts expect it to, we can only hope that Apple helps show pub­lish­ers The Way in a future ver­sion of the iPhone SDK, sim­il­ar to Amazon’s act­ive con­tent Kindle devel­op­ment kit (KDK) announced yes­ter­day. If the tab­let suc­ceeds in its arena, the way the iPhone has before, authors and pub­lish­ers will be able to Pub­lish Different.

The cur­rently lead­ing name for the device is the iSlate — based on some clev­er detect­ive work that uncovered Apple own­er­ship of the domain name:

…islate.com was registered to Apple in 2007, through an inter­me­di­ary (to dis­guise its true own­er). At the moment, that domain does­n’t seem to lead anywhere—and there are a couple explanations.

And, earli­er this month,  coin­cid­ent­ally coin­cid­ing with CES and the pleth­ora of Tab­let, Slate, Pad announce­ments from oth­er hard­ware vendors, Apple announced Wed­nes­day’s event, appar­ently leaked busi­ness and product pro­duc­tion inform­a­tion, and gen­er­ally kicked the hype level up a notch.

And frankly, I hope Apple does release a Tab­let. This kind of tech­no­logy has the abil­ity to change (again) how we work and think about dis­trib­uted com­put­ing tech. mak­ing it more mobile and  cre­at­ing new modes for con­sum­ing and inter­act­ing with content.

And yes, I’ll be pay­ing atten­tion to the event and post­ing my thoughts shortly afterward.