What the iSlate possibly looks like
The Apple iTablet / iSlate – what is it and what does it want? No one knows, everyone’s just very excited. Here at PNIQ we were more fascinated by the reaction to the announcement, which built to a head throughout the week. It’s amazing how little you have to do if you’re Apple and, of course, if you get your timing right. Here’s how it all happened.
>In fairness, the rumours had been around for a while, but the appropriately named MacRumors.com gave them a bit of a shove by announcing Apple had bought the domain name iSlate.com back in December of last year. Exciting.
>The blogosphere has been nattering about it ever since. The New York Times summarises it all nicely for us. Columnist David Carr, writing on 3 January, said: “I haven’t been this excited about buying something since I was eight years old and sent away for the tiny seahorses I saw advertised in the back of a comic book.” Goodness.
> On Sunday the invitations went out for the ‘whatever’ launch on Wednesday 27th Jan and everything went crazy. Still no one knew what the hell it was exactly, all we could be sure of was that everyone was talking about it.
>What’s a gadget without content? If the proposed iTablet / iSlate is going to take on the ebook, then a deal with a major publisher would come in handy.
>Soon enough, the speculation started about which mobile carriers would take it. Would it be a close deal with 02 like the iPhone? Come on, we don’t even know what it is yet!
>Everyone seemed to agree that the iTablet / iSlate will be game changing in some way. Tuaw, Apple’s unofficial blog, speculated that it could be the multimedia shot in the arm that the book industry needs. Imagine reading Harry Potter and watching a game of Quidditch at the same time, that kind of thing.
>What will it actually do? Charles Arthur at the Guardian shows how little we actually know, while giving a good account of what it might do and how it could build on pre-cursors from the likes of Microsoft.
>What’s more fascinating than what it does? What it’s called silly. The Telegraph reported that bookmakers Paddy Power had opened a book on the name, giving the iSlate the shortest odds. We like iScream.
>By Friday we thought everything that could have been said about the iTablet/ iSlate had been said, but The Times’s Antonia Senior had one more angle – the gadget could be the saviour of the written word, newspapers and magazines as well as books. Fingers crossed.
>Not all the news was coming from Apple. Do you think competitors are just going to sit back and watch? Possibly reacting to the Harper Collins deal, Mashable reported that Amazon had announced it would be giving a bigger cut to publishers for Kindle books.
It’s not over yet. Watch this space.
Apple
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Caroline Gilmour and Sam Mohtady, Porter Novelli UK. Porter Novelli UK said: Last week the world went crazy for the iTablet, iSlate thing. We discuss how it all went down. http://bit.ly/4EABj2 [...]
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[...] a fall Jump to Comments We got as excited as everyone else about the Apple launch (see our post about the iPad hype). Despite our years of consumer technology industry knowledge we really thought [...]
incredible, comes to show that apple really is the best!!!!!