Musing on an iTablet

Jason Snell at Macworld opines on the pos­si­bil­ity of Apple sell­ing read­ing con­tent on the myth­i­cal forth­com­ing Apple tablet. Overall, I pretty much agree Jason’s assess­ment, but the whole dis­cus­sion raises another ques­tion in my mind. I’m per­plexed by the fact that the bulk of the tech media seems to have latched onto the idea that this myth­i­cal Apple tablet is going to be about e-reading in gen­eral, or that it will be tar­geted specif­i­cally to com­pete with the Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook.

The Kindle and Nook, and the other minor play­ers in the e-reader space run for around two to three hun­dred dol­lars per unit, or approx­i­mately the cost of an iPhone or iPod Touch. Does any­one really see Apple releas­ing a new, larger, e-reading focused device at that price point? I sure as hell don’t. Additionally, as Jason points out, there are already sev­eral very well done e-reading solu­tions for the Mac OS (desk­top and Touch ver­sions) that have access to a wealth of con­tent, includ­ing the full libraries acces­si­ble to the Kindle and Nook.

My wild-ass sus­pi­cion is that, assum­ing the Apple tablet is actu­ally real, e-reading will be a small com­po­nent of its feature-set; with music and video tak­ing the larger role. iTunes LP and iTunes Extra spring to mind as much more com­pelling demon­stra­tions of a tablet form-factor device to the gen­eral mar­ket. To take my sus­pi­cions into com­plete fan­tasy land. I’m bet­ting that we see ini­tial roll-out of the iTablet includ­ing a few (or per­haps even just one) select 3^rd party e-reader appli­ca­tions, with full access to the App Store com­ing at a later date; per­haps coin­cid­ing with the release of iPhone OS 4.0.