These invitations aren’t a comprehensive record of every interesting product Apple has released–some of the biggies have been announced at Macworld Expo and Apple’s own WWDC, which are held sans cryptic invites. And I haven’t attempted to document every invite here–just a bunch of representative highlights.
Once again, I’m going to give you guys a chance to make Apple predictions in the days before an Apple press event. (You’re no worse at it than most of the folks who get paid big bucks to do so.) This time I’d like you to take a stab at figuring out exactly what sort of tablet device Apple will announce next Wednesday, assuming it does indeed announce such a device. And if you still think Apple won’t make such an announcement–which is a pretty gutsy prediction at this point–you can make that opinion known, too.
To participate in what I’m thinking of as Technologizer’s Apple Tablet Prediction Project, click here and answer the multiple-choice questions you’ll find. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, and here’s an incentive to take part: We’ll draw one entry at random and give the person who submitted it a $100 gift card for the U.S. Apple Store.
You can fill out our T.A.T.P.P. survey through 5pm on Thursday, January 21st, at which point we’ll close it, crunch the results, and publish your aggregate guesses. If the machine you envision as a group ends up bearing much resemblance to the one Apple announces–probably!–next week, it’ll be impressive. And even if you’re way off base, this should be entertaining.
We know so very little about the Apple tablet, but the invites to a January 27 Apple event that arrived today add a new wrinkle to the story: Among the invitees was Kotaku, a prominent gaming blog. That suggests there will be enough gaming related news to merit Kotaku’s attendance.
Could the tablet be Apple’s biggest push into video games yet? Let’s look at the clues.
In April, Gizmodo reported that Apple hired two gaming executives within a week’s time. There was Richard Teversham, former senior European director of business, insights and strategy for the Xbox, and Bob Drebin, chief technical officer of AMD’s graphics group and creator of the graphics chip for Nintendo’s GameCube. Tablet rumors had been around for years at that point, but the story was finding new momentum thanks to a Wall Street Journal story on Steve Jobs’ health and ongoing projects.
August yielded a juicy rumor from an unnamed analyst, who told Barron’s that Apple’s tablet would emphasize multimedia and gaming. Another analyst, Jon Peddie, added that gaming “will be a big part of what this is about.” Grain of salt: The unnamed analyst projected a November 2009 launch.
In November, an Apple job posting appeared, seeking a game designer for the iPhone and iPod Touch. One potential theory held that this was actually a covert gig for tablet game development.
It’s also worth mentioning that Apple talked up gaming in two press events last year. The unveil of the iPhone’s OS 3.0 included support for microtransactions, and Apple made a point of knocking Sony and Nintendo at its iPod event in September. Not tablet-related, but proof that Apple now sees gaming as a lucrative business.
Revisiting my reasons Apple shouldn’t get into gaming, I still think a dedicated game console doesn’t make much sense, and a tablet whose primary purpose is gaming would disappoint a lot of people. But if Apple indeed reveals the tablet on January 27, and a significant chunk of Steve Jobs’ presentation demonstrates some new ways of playing video games, I wouldn’t be surprised.
I haven’t bought a desktop PC in three years–and the one desktop I still own that’s still in service spends most of its time sitting alone and unused. Nothing extraordinary there: Laptops now outsell desktops, and you’ve gotta figure that the most likely scenario is that desktops’ share of the market will continue to dwindle over the next few years until they’re archaic oddities, like floppy disks or dot-matrix printers.
Or maybe not. For my latest guest post on WePC.com, “The Future of Desktop PCs (and How They Can Have One)””, I propose six things that PC manufacturers can do to revitalize the desktop market–or at least get me intrigued by the category again. I hope you find my ideas thought-provoking enough that you’ll leave a comment over there with yours…
I just got invited to another San Francisco press event. This one’s being held by Nokia this Thursday at 9am, and as with Apple’s event next week the invite aims to be cryptic but tantalizing:
I don’t know whether Nokia’s unveiling a specific product–it could just be previewing its announcements for Mobile World Congress, the Barcelona phone megashow a month from now. And the fact that the event’s being held six days before Apple’s bash in the same city may or may not be a coincidence. Let’s find out together–I’m attending this event, too, and will provide live coverage here.
[UPDATE: Nokia UK is sending out invites to an event, too–and theirs specify that it’s about Nokia’s Ovi service platform. Logical assumption: Nokia is announcing the same news in multiple venues. Engadget speculates that it involves a new version of the Ovi application store.]
If the rumor that Apple was holding a press event on January 27th had turned out to be false, we would have had to reassess everything we think we sort of know about its tablet device. But the event is on, as confirmed by the invitation that went out this morning to members of the media.
Of course, the invitation doesn’t say what the creation in question is–Apple’s invites never get too specific. On the other hand, they’re never deceptive, either. And the fact that this one refers to a single creation and doesn’t even hint at a focus such as music may be evidence that this is, indeed, the tablet. Or at least it’s not evidence that it isn’t the tablet. (How’s that for brilliant tea-leaf reading?)
One way or another, all will be known next week. I’ll be sitting in the audience at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and as usual, I’ll share everything I learn just as fast as I learn it. Please join me a week from Wednesday at 10am for our live coverage. Barring unforeseen circumstances–the new creation isn’t an exciting new iPod sock, is it?–this promises to be a lot of fun.
Joking about terrorism on Twitter can get you in deep trouble. (Weirdest part of this story: It involves an airport named after Robin Hood. Say, wasn’t he a terrorist?)
A “6in, high-brightness, OLED colour screen that should run for a whopping 122 hours on one battery charge“? That’s either one of the biggest breakthroughs in display technology in eons, or a misunderstanding, or partial information that doesn’t mention some gigantic gotcha. I hope it’s the first of these possibilities, but I’m not placing any bets…
Whenever I write about Aliph’s Jawbone Bluetooth headsets, I start by explaining that I’ve never met a Bluetooth headset I really wanted to use. The company is releasing a new version of the Jawbone it’s calling the Jawbone Icon–and this major update addresses all of the gripes I’ve always held about the category, and adds some multiple other nifty features as well.
The most immediately striking thing about the Icon is something I don’t care that much about: It’s available in six stylish versions. The last Jawbone version, the Jawbone Prime, came in multiple colors, but the Icon tops that by offering six distinct industrial designs in different colors and textures,, with versions designed to appeal to both women and men, and both highly blingy and relatively subdued versions. They’re known as the Hero, the Rogue, the Thinker, the Ace, the Bombshell, and the Catch.
Here they are:
Period, question mark, exclamation point — the written word has done just fine with these three sentence-ending punctuations, but Sarcasm, Inc. reckons there’s room for one more.
The SarcMark aims to make sarcasm easier to express online, essentially by beating the reader over the head with it. Add the squiggly and dot to the end of a sentence, and you’ll know your words won’t be interpreted as genuine. Make no mistake, the SarcMark is a real product, selling for $2 if you want to type it on your Mac, Windows or Blackberry keyboard by holding Ctrl and pressing “.”
If you can’t tell from the tone of my words alone, I’m not convinced the world needs a SarcMark. For that matter I’m not certain the very concept isn’t a work of sarcasm.
The problem with SarcMark is partly technical. Unless the idea catches on in the mainstream, you’ll have to explain its meaning to everyone who sees it. So you’re explaining a punctuation that’s explaining sarcasm. That’s not redundant or anything.
But the bigger issue is that sarcasm doesn’t deserve the easy pass, even if the problem it’s trying to solve is genuine. There are plenty of emotions that are tough to convey in words alone, such as dejection, skepticism, urgency and calm. Why should sarcasm, above all, get its own punctuation?
Let’s just give sarcasm an emoticon and call it a day.
