Apple Tablet Buzz Reaches Roar As 'T-Day' Arrives

Speculation about Apple's long-awaited tablet-like device was reaching a climax as the hours ticked away to Wednesday's expected unveiling of a brand new, category-defining product by the Cupertino, Calif.-based company.

Perhaps the only thing Apple watchers agree on is that it won't be called an "iTablet." Mac Observer columnist Chuck La Tournous held out hope Tuesday that "this isn't an "i-" anything," instead pushing for a name such as "Palette" or "Canvas."

La Tournous also raised an issue that we later asked some longtime Apple VARs to comment on -- exactly what is Apple's new product going to be instrumental at doing in such a way that millions will suddenly discover that they "won't be able to live without" it?

"I don't feel a gap in my technology needs right now. My desktop and (increasingly) my laptop serve my full-bore computer needs and my iPhone serves me very well as a mobile computing device. Almost every item in my once-long wish list has been checked off, either by improvements to the phone by Apple, or more often by ingenious apps from independent developers," he writes.

If Apple fans like La Tournous believe their needs are mostly met already, it means Apple might have more of a challenge with its tablet device than it had with the iPod and iPhone, although both of those were obviously groundbreaking devices.

But the iPod and iPhone also had the advantage of breaking into healthy, existing markets for portable music players in the case of the former and smart phones for the latter. That is to say, as products they were "primary devices" with established potential user bases.

Can the same be said of a 10-inch multi-touch tablet (citing the barebones specs of what most expect to see from Apple on Wednesday)? What category does such a device slide into, what existing consumer base that's already using something similar as a primary device but is eager from a sleeker, better product from Apple?

La Tournous isn't sure, but he is pretty confident that Apple must have figured it out ahead of time.

"I firmly believe Apple's already thought this through and the new device will have something more, something new to offer. Something none of us have guessed. Something none of us knew we wanted. And something that, starting [Wednesday], many of us suddenly won't be able to live without," he writes.

That would seem to be a pretty tall order, even for such a successful deliverer of "doh!-I-wish-I'd-thought-of-that" products as Apple. We put the question of what "primary device" function the new Apple product will serve to one longstanding Apple reseller partner.

"I think there's a chance that this is the primary device for periodicals or printed pubs. It becomes the paper of the 21st century, especially if it's essentially go full-time connectivity," said Nick Gold, sales manager at Baltimore-based Chesapeake Systems.

Gold also echoed La Tournous' sentiment that it would likely be a mistake to view the new device as "as a scaled-back computer" a la netbooks, or "merely a bigger iPhone," or even as "another Kindle-like eReader." Instead, "Apple makes devices that are powerful enough for what they're optimized to do and that's what this one will be," Gold said.

Here's another question -- given the fair assumption that this will be a consumer-targeted product first and foremost, might Apple also eventually penetrate the commercial space with it, perhaps even more forcefully than the stealthy fashion with which the iPhone has come to compete with the Blackberry in business environments?

Next: Will It Be A Business Tool?

John Eaton, president of San Francisco-based solution provider Eaton & Associates, thinks Apple "will need to successfully marry the intuitiveness of the iPhone interface with the ability to do real-world work that is expected from a notebook" to achieve a foothold in the commercial market that his company serves.

"The trick will be for Apple to capture the best of these two worlds. Given that OSX does not have the same level of intuitiveness or multi-touch controls that make an iPod so good and that the iPod OS can't run business class applications, I am very interested to see how Apple pulls this off," Eaton said.

"There will need to be a healthy supply of work/productivity applications as well as 'info-tainment' and entertainment type applications. Some sort of iPhone application support, which is rumored, would be interesting. In short, they are going to have to pull off the interface, have some slick hardware and a critical mass of relevant applications for the tablet to take off as a primary business tool."

And what about that hardware? The consensus seems to be that the only real shocker would be if Apple used an x86-based chip from Intel as the central processor in the device, but any arrangement of other components could be under the hood.

Michael Oh co-wrote a white paper examining the potential ecosystem for the anticipated Apple tablet, but the president of Boston-based Apple reseller Tech Superpowers said he's "been staying away from the guessing game" regarding the nuts-and-bolts of the device itself.

"My kind of overall opinion is that battery life is going to be a real issue with any device like this. I think Apple will really minimize the form factor, make it a lot thinner as a differentiator between this and other tablet PCs," he said.

Oh, who is also a co-founder of Codex Development, a London-based developer of mobile applications for Apple operating systems, said "some sacrifices on processor power and graphics in favor of battery life" were likely in the new device. That's a tradeoff that Apple is probably more willing to make these days, thanks to lessons gleaned from the netbook explosion, he said.

"From a performance standpoint, what we've learned from netbooks is that people can do a lot with not so much," Oh said. "The trick is if they're adding any advanced functionality. Let's say, hypothetically, they have gesture recognition in the device. That's another bit of hardware that may need to be active. Or maybe some other type of connectivity that we're not thinking about. WiFi and 3G by themselves are both battery hogs."

As for the original question of what absolutely necessary thing will this new device actually do -- Oh, like La Tournous and others, thinks it may be some new usage model or combination of models that Apple leads the way in creating.

That's one reason Oh also thinks that Apple may not be as ambitious with sales targets for the tablet as it was with the iPhone or the iPod.

"Maybe they try for one million sold rather than 50 million or whatever. It's still a very nice profit center for them," he said.