Apple delights in the fact that although people usually have an inkling about what it is planning to launch at high profile media events, they never have the entire scoop. So what people are predicting for January 27th at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco is quite simply the tablet, iSlate or oversize touch, whichever of those or anything else you want to call it.
Quite clearly Apple would get nowhere with a device on its owns, and although it already has two services ‘ iTunes and the App Store, which pretty much both apply as services with every Apple device, there will need to be at least one or two new services on the new device.
If Apple goes with only the creation of a new series of Harper Collins ebooks on the device, which is widely rumored, and this all runs off iTunes, along with existing ebooks, it will be interesting, but not spectacular. It will be more spectacular if AT&T provides cellular service to deliver those ebooks, from iTunes or something like it.
If the device can download and/or stream films from the iTunes Store, and a whole bunch of new TV series and films are signed up, then well and good, but this will be over wi-fi, we are fairly sure. But if Apple says ‘just one more thing’ at the end, the smart money is on a streamed series of TV channels that can be streamed from iTunes on any Apple device, including this one, again most likely viewed over fixed broadband including wi-fi. If that happens, the company will have done it again and created a challenge to existing TV services.
The e-mail invite says “Come See Our Latest Creation,” and Apple would not be so dumb as to go up against the recent tablets that are being paraded by rivals, who have been trying to outguess Apple, unless it had an edge that made its purchase a ‘no brainer.’
One idea is ‘comes with wi-fi, a year’s free broadband, to support video streaming, with the AT&T network being used. This way AT&T will get some revenue back from its partnership with Apple, in which it has had to offer Apple some of its core cellular data service revenue. Perhaps AT&T will get some of the famous Apple hardware revenues.