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And on the seventh day of tablet-awaiting, we note (with great optimism) what today’s tablet-computing offerings might end up looking like as soon as Apple shows their tablet thingy.
Damn, that’s a good point. Remember when mp3 players were fugly, chunky, and stupid? I still defy Apple to solve the problem of replacing physical keyboards (I love my iPhone but it’s still slow as hell to type on; how could I tolerate that on a thousand-dollar machine?), but who the hell knows?
I suspect that if this iTablet is real, it will allow you connect to a wireless (or wired) keyboard. You can kinda understand why it wasn’t offered for the iPhone, but on a device that would be sold as a computer (or near-computer), a physical keyboard option would be required. That said, I think there are many ways to implement a useable virtual keyboard, and Apple is one of the few companies I would trust to do it right.
You really need to consider how to make the keyboard show and hide intuitively so that it doesn’t get in the way. The iPhone seems to do a good job of this, and I think a virtual keyboard like the iPhones would be much easier to type on if it was closer to the size of a physical keyboard.
I still skeptical about the tablet, but the more I think about it, the less farfetched it gets. Apple could take all of the lessons they learned from the iPhone and just scale them up to a larger device. You can’t just do what Microsoft and PC manufacturers are doing with Slate PCs, which is to basically take the existing software, add a few gestures to it, and dump it on a touch screen device. You need to redesign the OS keeping in mind that fingers and hands are going to be the main input method. It creates more challenges, but at the same time it opens up so many opportunities
