Did You Hear? I Think Apple’s Releasing a Tablet!

One of many Apple tablet mock ups (via Gizmodo)

The hype surrounding Apple’s potential tablet release this year has gotten to be pretty unbearable over the past few weeks. The ever-contentious Joe Wilcox argued that the world doesn’t need tablets, John Gruber wrote that it may potentially be “Apple’s reconception of person computing“, while many others are treating it like the coming of the Messiah.

Now many sources are reporting that Apple is set for a “major product announcement” on Jan. 27th, and that a French developer has received a beta of the iPhone OS4 SDK, which includes options for scaling applications to tablet screen sizes. The Wall Street Journal also lends further credence to the tablet news by reporting that Apple is set to unveil the tablet device later this month, with a release in March. Hopefully once we get some concrete info on this thing, the tech blogosphere will calm down a bit.

Over the past few months, I’ve written a bit about tablets over at Royal Pingdom. In December, I asked “Who needs tablet computers anyway?” While my title may sound similar to Wilcox’s above article, I approached the question in a very different way. I don’t deny that tablets will eventually become a widely useful computing segment, but I think it’s going to take some time for them to find their place in our computing lives.

Several months ago, I also wrote about how great it is that Microsoft’s Courier device is taking a completely different approach from what we hear about the Apple tablet. Personally, I want a Courier more than any other tablet I’ve seen thus far.