Come on, you have to admit it. This article has all of us gizmo fanboys drooling.<p>ASK HN: How many of you guys would shell out $800 for this thing? Honestly. I'm thinking about buying it for my dad.
John Gruber says it's going to be 2010 and gizmodo is wrong claiming it will be released soon (<a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/08/13/insider-eh" rel="nofollow">http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/08/13/insider-eh</a>)
This is a case where I believe there is a tablet coming out, but this is simply another unsubstantiated claim about a conversation with some dude who's playing a dude who's playing another dude. Unless someone has an actual freaking picture of one of the damn things, its all bunk and blog bait.<p>What I would really be interested in seeing are the log leaks that directly revealed the first versions of the iPhone. I forget which site did it, but essentially some smart admin looked through their web server logs and saw a handful of user agents that matched up to the then unreleased mobile Safari. Or maybe this was for the unibody Macbooks, I forget.
I find it interesting that someone, assumably high up enough in the pecking order, is sourcing information like this. I've always been interested in the psychology of it. What's the motivation? The cheap thrill to see your handy work through a third party on a popular website? Cashing in on a rise in stock (+3 today)? Or maybe it's false information being planted and this is all sanctioned by marketing?
The big question for me is whether it can mix simulateous reading and typing, as well as a traditional hinged laptop does (with one surface for typing and one for viewing).<p>Otherwise, it might prove awkward as a remote-getting-stuff-done unit -- in libraries, cafes, airplane seats, etc.: if flat for typing, it's hard to read; if angled for viewing, it's hard to type.<p>A symmetrical hinged dual touch display, as in the next-gen OLPC2 prototypes, might do the trick. (Could lens/optical tricks make the seam nearly invisible when flat? I wouldn't put it past Apple.)<p>Here's the OLPC 2.0 dual-touchscreen concept:<p><a href="http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/27/olpc-xo-2-to-include-multitouch-and-possibly-haptic-screen-from/" rel="nofollow">http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/27/olpc-xo-2-to-include-mult...</a><p><a href="http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/olpc-2-0-dual-touchscreen-mockup-surfaces-in-the-wild/" rel="nofollow">http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/olpc-2-0-dual-touchscreen...</a>