Best Guess
OK, so how about your best guess on what's going to be unveiled tomorrow. This is mine based on rumours and pure, idle speculation:
It's a tablet with a 10" or thereabouts touchscreen. It will look like a overgrown iPhone. It will have a front facing camera that will have a role in the way you interact with it, e.g. via a pupil tracker, (some advanced cameras have this), so that where you look on the screen will be where the cursor moves, whilst clicks will be registered with fingers (on the side, or something like that). It will have a separate wireless bluetooth keyboard that can also be used in a kind of 'docked' laptop mode, but when on the road the primary input will be via a virtual split-keyboard via the touchscreen. The entire back of the device will also be gesture sensitive, so the interaction will be quite novel and will involve some learning on the part of the user. The 'killer app' will be in education and publishing, Apple will have partnered with major textbook and content publishers to provide very slick content for the device; it will also be a competitor to Kindle as an ebook reader. But it will make Kindle look like a dinosaur. The whole 'point' of the device will be to get us to rethink what print media is: it's no longer text with a bit of multimedia chucked in. Books, magazines, newspapers won't simply be poor approximations of their paper counterparts, these media themselves will be re-imagined, will come to be something else on this new platform. Of course you'll be able to watch films, listen to music, play games, and run Apps, but it will be a closed system -- more iPhone than MacOSx. The screen will be colour transflective (unlike Kindle's black and white) and will not require a backlight in daylight. The whole thing will be thin enough to flex. It will have two dock ports so that it can be used in portrait and landscape, the dock will effectively turn it into a laptop. Perhaps the dock will *be* the keyboard, plus all the connectivity (USB, firewire, etc.). In short, it will be incredibly light and thin, very portable. It will be a convergence device: somewhere between an iPhone and a MacBook Air, but it will be more than the sum of its conceptual parts. In this device, Apple will be creating demand for a new product, not responding to existing demand. Finally, it will be relatively affordable by Apple standards -- maybe around the £599 mark in the UK, about $699 in the US. Oh, and it will obviously have wifi, plus some very tempting 3G/4G data deal, a bit like Kindle's Whispernet: and it will be available via a load of different carriers. There may well be some kind of dual plan for existing iPhone users. It will be the implementation more than the functionality that will make this such a novel product. And, last of all, immediately after its release they'll be a raft of posters lamenting all the specs that it does not have (rather than what it does)!
