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The rumour mine: $600 Apple Tablet coming Jan 26th and called iSlate to have tactile feedback keyboard

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The rumour mine: $600 Apple Tablet coming Jan 26th and called iSlate to have tactile feedback keyboard
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If it were possible to touch rumours, it still wouldn't be possible to those concerning the Apple Tablet. Why? Because they would be so damn hot.

Just the other day we were reporting that developers are being told to make apps for full-screen displays and that a 7-inch Apple Tablet demo would be available in January, and already a cluster of new rumours have a arrived at the party and are holding court with their anecdotes and gossip.

The first of these concerns the release date. We had already heard that January was likely for the launch, but thanks to the New York Times we know that the 26th is more or less probable, Apple having booked a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for around then. Apple has declined to comment.

The next rumour relates to the name of this officially unacknowledged object. Thanks to a discovery made by MacRumours and elaborated on by TechCrunch, we can speculate with a moderate amount of confidence that the Tablet will actually be called the iSlate.

Read the stories on those two sites for a full account, but the gist of the rumour is that a company called MarkMonitor owns the domain name iSlate.com (as well as .co.uk, .biz, etc) and has done for a couple of years. MarkMonitor handles domain registrations for Apple.

Next up there's the keyboard. One of the things people complain about most often in the iPhone and iPod touch is the lack of physical feedback.

It would appear that Apple has been listening to these complaints. Thanks to a patent filed by Apple for something called, "Keystroke Tactility Arrangement on a Smooth Touch Surface”, we can speculate that the Apple Tablet (pardon me - iSlate) will have something like a physical keyboard when in keyboard mode.

There are several proposed technical solutions for integrating something like a physical keyboard into the iSlate, but to cut a long patent-related story short it seems to involve an articulating or non-articulating frame that sits under the surface of the device and comes into action whenever you want to type something, simulating the experience of using a real keyboard.

Finally, despite the iSlate not officially existing the analysts have been imagining its impact for quite some time, and this week Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster has added his voice to the chorus, saying that the iSlate - well, 'Tablet' in his outdated language - would probably cost around $600 and would sell 1.4 million in 2010.

But you know what analysts are like.

Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.