The Spirit of the Stairwell

Take a look at this picture.

It’s a pretty rubbish picture, isn’t it? It’s grainy and someone has taken chunks out of it. It’s low resolution and you can’t see much of anything.

Well it may interest you to know, gentle reader, that this unassuming picture is currently making the internet geek out in a fairly major way. Because this might very well be the first public photo of the iTablet – the new Apple product Steve Jobs is set to present to the world at 6.00pm GMT today.

Rumours of the iTablet have been rife since 2002 when everyone thought it was basically going to be an iPod with a keyboard. Since there it’s gone through many rumoured iterations, everything from a flat MacBook to a giant iPhone. But the really funny thing is, all of this furious product development is in our heads. Apple has kept completely silent about the thing, it won’t officially confirm it exists at all. Even the invitation for today just says:

So what we’re talking about here is a fictional product that the public has seemingly willed into existence just by dint of WANTING it so badly. At some point in the past, someone presumably thought ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if Apple made a tablet device?’ and from that inauspicious starting point we’ve collectively worked ourselves up into a frothing mess. Without Apple lifting a finger. It’s a wonder they bother doing any advertising at all. (Especially when it’s this smug and irritating)

So if Steve Jobs does present the technological equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster today, there’s a good chance it’ll look like the photo above. There have been many a photoshopped hoax before, ranging from the plausible:

To the slightly silly:

… but nothing as realistic as the above. It’s bolted down, it doesn’t give anything away. It has the whiff of authenticity.

The other thing is that we’re not really even sure what we want the device to do. “Tablet” is a form factor, it’s the body the clever stuff is housed in, it doesn’t give any clue as to what the gizmo would actually do. Is it a slightly more portable laptop, an ebook reader, a PDA writ large, an entertainment and games system? Knowing Apple it’ll probably be a lot of these things but there are still a myriad ways to implement those functions. Do you go for a traditional OS X set up with files and folders and a simulated desktop environment or something more like the multi-function iPhone OS which basically transforms the entire user interface on the fly depending on the function you select? We may firmly believe that this thing is going to revolutionise portable computing forever (like the iPhone arguably has for the mobile phone industry) but as it stands we just have no conception of what it actually is or what it’ll do for us.

Until now.

Because that picture above gives away more than it seems to. If it’s genuine (and I think it is) then we’ve finally got some answers to at least some of our questions. For a start that’s undeniably a massive version of an iPhone application, so we now know it’ll be running something at least closely related to the iPhone OS. Also notice the wifi icon at the top of the page and the “no service” mobile phone signal indicator. So it’ll probably have wireless and a (persistent?) 3G connection – something akin to Amazon’s Kindle – allowing the user to download books, newspapers, movies, albums and browse the web. The iTunes store will become the iGeneral store and Apple begins to take on Amazon on it’s home ground. You can also see a home button at the bottom, identical to that on an iPhone so we know something about the styling. Other rumours suggest a 10.1 inch screen and an aluminium back to fit in with the new iMacs and MacBook Pros.

So there we are, it’s the day of the launch and we’ve finally been able to define the device pretty well. What surprises haveApple managed to preserve?

Well for a start we just made up the name iTablet …

Finally, it returns. I haven’t got any better but at least this time you can listen to Laura singing.

I’m learning to play the ukulele. It’s a tiny little guitar and it makes me look like a giant. At the moment, on a scale of 1 to 100, I’m absolutely rubbish.

Anyway, I’ll be putting up a video about once a week so I guess we’ll all see if I improve at all.

In this first musical extravaganza I play something that sounds a bit like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony while maintaining a look of pure terror on my face.

Also once it’s finished I look inappropriately pleased with myself.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my first faltering steps towards competency, I give you Ukulele Diary: Day One …

Been working on this film festival for the last year. The After Show party is free and who doesn’t love getting beyond drunk on a Thursday night?