If there’s a tablet version of the iPod touch, it certainly won’t be announced in April. That’s a major platform and strategic change. June is iPhone/iPod Touch month for Apple; it just happens to be the same month of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. It’s also the month Steve Jobs is expected back in some capacity at Apple. And since the device will run iPhone 3.0, which won’t be released until late June or early July anyway, it doesn’t make sense to announce anything until then, when the entire world will be watching.

Sure, April is when school purchasing starts, but Apple won’t announce anything or target to education until there’s an actual product; all of the pieces (mainly iPhone 3.0) won’t be ready until the summer.

Assuming the economy doesn’t get much worse, Apple will sell tons of these devices during the holiday shopping season, just like the iPod Touch was huge for them last holiday season.

We’re also expecting a 10-inch diagonal screen, not 8″ x 10″.

Anyway, good stuff. Can’t wait to hear more.

P.S.I look forward to learning if my (or your) analysis is flawed. It has a 45 day limit.

Anything aimed at the student market would have to be: light, durable and fit for purpose. The product you’ve outlined above is none of those things. No one in business strategy at Apple would seriously give this a second thought.

And contrary to some of the commenters above, I don’t think bookm publishers would be too quick to get in bed with Apple directly, and most certainly not with an Apple-controlled DRM format (like I’ve been saying http://gravitationalpull.net/wp/?p=390).

Then again, the whole Barnes & Noble buys Fictionwise shakes things up quite a bit in the ebook space. I am expecting, sadly, that book publishers will use Fictionwise the way that music publishers are using Amazon’s MP3 store. That is, as a club to beat the market leader with to get price hikes ($1.29 price point for new releases coming to the iTunes store in April). It seems like Amazon is already inching up ebook prices on new releases (especially for popular books not on the NYT best-seller list) though it’s hard to tell since some minority of new ebooks have always come out in that $11 to $15 range.

This is Apple we’re talking about, the price will be no less than $999.

No. The rumor is a ten-inch *diagonal* screen. Which would give it the dimensions of the 10″-screened hp mini 1000: 10.3 in x 6.56 in.

This is considerably smaller, far less cumbersome to hold, and in fact a killer size.

It’s interesting you did this post today. I was just in J&R this morning again fondling that mini and made a point to look at the screen size and think, “Hm, so that’s what a 10-inch iPod Touchbook would be like!”

I disagree about partnering with amazon. That would make my jaw fall off. If there’s one thing that’s worse than ePub aesthetically, it’s amazon’s K eBook format!

Plus, what about Stanza Reader, which does ePub? ePub — now from both Google and Gutenberg, aside from every mainstream print publisher?

I think Apple will do its own eBook format solution (hey, they pioneered DTP, you expect them to go *backward* in aesthetics?) and there is The Disney Card:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/october-the-ipod-touchbook/

One thing I agree with you about: This will run iPhone OS, not Mac OS X.

And I don’t think Steve Jobs would be well enough to do this, even though he would love to. Seems like he’s just concentrating on getting healthier.

But interesting stuff.