WSJ: Apple tablet to have books, games, music, TV, will make sandwiches

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget....te-0110-sm.jpgThe Wall Street Journal just laid out a doozy of an Apple tablet rumor piece, all from anonymous sources, "people familiar with the matter," and the like. There's a lot to go through, so without further ado:

• The tablet will come with a virtual keyboard -- kind of a no-brainer if it's gonna be a keyboard-less tablet and not, say, another laptop.
• Apple's been talking with The New York Times, Conde Nast, and HarperCollins / News Corp. over how they could collaborate. When asked, NYT Chairman Arthur Sulzberger would only say "stay tuned."
• Electronic Arts has been working closely to prep games for the tablet. We know of a number of gaming journalists who've gotten invites to next week's event, and given Apple's heavy games push over the past year or so, this wouldn't surprise us in the least.
• A reaffirmation of earlier murmurings about potentially swapping Google for Bing as the de facto search engine.
• Those TV subscription rumors? Apparently the gang in Cupertino have been pitching a "best of TV" service that would package the best four to six shows per channel.
• A web-based version of iTunes, tentatively called iTunes.com and potentially launching in June, for buying music outside of the dedicated app. Additionally, there'd be a new initiative "to populate as many webs ites as possible with 'buy' buttons, integrating iTunes transactions into activities like listening to internet radio and surfing review web sites." No mention if music will be downloaded or streamed from the cloud, but we can definitely see how Apple's recent Lala acquisition would play into this in the future -- in fact, we've already seen it start to bear fruit.
• Here's a weird one: Apple has supposedly designed the tablet "so that it is intuitive to share." One such experiment is virtual sticky notes that launch for the intended recipient by facial recognition via built-in camera.

If nothing else, we're really looking forward to next week putting a large clamp on the torrent of tablet rumors that have have propagated the internet for the last few months.WSJ: Apple tablet to have books, games, music, TV, will make sandwiches originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.


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