“the rabbits in front of the snake”
On Wednesday, January 27th, (not only) the IT-world will be looking westwards to what is coming from Cupertino. Apple will reveal their “latest creation”.
Nothing new regarding the staging: rumors are piling in blogs and news lists for months, analysts predict the dark or golden future of Apple and their competitors (depending on who pays them).
And yet, there seems to be a different touch this time. The Apple iSlate has been rumored for more than a year now, and even Steve Ballmer talked about “… what we will call slate PCs …” at this year’s CES. He showed actual hardware by HP and others, but they were running “only” Windows 7, i.e., there were merely PCs reduced to a small(er) screen without a keyboard – nothing what we would call innovation.
Not that the R&D departments of Microsoft, HP, Sony … have been shut down. No, even worse, they seem to hold still until Apple has defined the new standard of interactions and services for a tablet PC. This somehow reminds me of what happened with the iPhone, but whereas with the iPhone it seemed to have happened by chance, this time it looks to be on purpose.
Let’s see what we’ll get on Wednesday … !
PS: We don’t really know how the “iThing” will look like in particular, but take a look at this nice video from Bonnier R&D, which gives an idea of what it takes to move forward to new standards.
