It turns out that there have been rumors about the 'iTablet' for years now. There have been a recent spate I caught this week from the Cranky Geeks. They report the rumor and then dis the product idea. I think they are being paid to shutup and say stupid things, like they did about the video iPod. The dimensions of the product? A $800 machine with a 9.7 inch screen coming in October.
A DS style deal with two screens that turns into a two-page reader is a spectacular idea. An oversized iTouch is a stupid idea. But note how the rumor has the screen at 9.7 inches. That's the exact same size as the Kindle DX. My speculation has been that Apple wants a Kindle killer and I expect that Jobs will want to do with books and texts of all sorts what he has done with music, which is boldly forge alignments that change the industry forever.
Everything that Google has done, somewhat, and failed to do in convincing various publishers to go digital can be done with an Apple/Amazon alliance. Or Apple could do it alone. All you have to do is imagine is Jobs saying with major book publishers what he said with the major music industry players when the iTunes store was first announced. It can be that big.
An iReader with multitouch is reasonably priced at 800 for gearhead first adopters like me, and can come down to Kindle prices next Christmas.
I don't know how anyone can not imagine Apple building a sexier device with multitouch and text to speech that blows the doors off of a Kindle DX. That's all this product needs to do. The problem will be, of course, the liklihood that Apple will overload the iTunes Store. It needs to be a different kind of store, if you ask me, and it needs to be a touch more open so that booksellers can get on board.
If anybody at Apple is as visionary as I am, then they will see a market for 'book developers' which is at least as large as the blogosphere, and they will find a way to monetize writing and lower barriers to self-publication in the same way they have generated a new class of software developers.If they added a bit more brains to that vision, then they would do speech recognition in a devkit that would provide for transcribed podcasts.
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