What I Want to Know About the Imaginary Apple Tablet.
Daring Fireball and so many others have been doing a great job covering and speculating the notion of the supposed Apple tablet.
Still, nobody is talking about what I’m most curious about. Will the tablet (if it exists) recognize stylus input? Everyone keeps talking about the reason why the tablet would exist, and the conversation usually revolves around media. I admit, the e-reader attempts on the market leave me wanting, and the idea of an Apple built book reader gets me pumped. But not nearly as much as a thin, sexy touch pad that I can write, and sketch on.
I don’t even need it to do handwriting recognition. I just want an all digital portable solution for notetaking in meetings, and on the phone. Furthermore, although almost all of my life is digital, I have to use paper for sketching. I’ve tried Wacom tablets in the past- and it never quite stuck. The distance from pen tip to screen just never translated into the kind of freedom I need to really make sketching useful. But having a pen leave a trail of digital ink behind sounds really fantastic.
I know The Steve was very degrading about the notion of stylus input for the iPhone- and I agree. But maybe, a larger screen, and a slightly different feature set will make pen based input work. I hope…