In the pointless rumor department, MacDailyNews says an Apple tablet could be coming this October.
Think MacBook screen, possibly a bit smaller, in glass with iPhone-like, but fuller-featured Multi-Touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X. Slot-loading SuperDrive. Accelerometer. GPS.
Sounds like a wish list.
Michael Harrington has his own; We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200. Help Us Build It.
I’m tired of waiting - I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too.
The N800 is now $219 at Amazon. The $200 OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner is getting unpacked, photographed, and examined.
Nokia’s Internet Tablet OS (abbreviated ITOS by the community) is an operating system for the Nokia Internet Tablet. It is often referred to as “Maemo“, in reference to the name of the Nokia-sponsored Maemo project that oversees its development. Like Nokia’s Maemo, OpenMoko uses GTK+ as well as OpenedHand’s lightweight Matchbox window manager.
In other news, now there’s a WordPress app for iPhone available for download from the iTunes App Store. The software lets you update your WordPress blog from anywhere.
TabletPC Talk, Internet Tablet Talk, and Linux Devices have more.
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