Apple Tablet Mockup: A Giant iPod Touch Running iPhone Apps

One of the greatest things about Apple is that their new launches are always so much shrouded in mystery till the last minute that rumors and speculations just don't die till the actual announcement. 

With less than five days to go, I'm sure many of you, like me are eagerly waiting for Apple to unveil their "latest creation" - the Tablet.

Despite the inside scoops that have "revealed" some critical aspects about the Tablet's hardware and software, things are still very fuzzy. However, if we do away with speculations brought about by "inside sources", it is still possible to infer a few possibilities merely by logic. 

Dave Hornsby, the UK based app developer from Chilli-X does an interesting analysis of the Tablet's possible use-cases to predict a few things about the device. Speaking about the OS, Hornsby writes:

"It won’t be running Snow Leopard – there’s no point putting the same operating system that people use to do high end rendering and print ready artwork on a small, less powerful device. If it was to run Snow Leopard then Apple would have to figure out a way of stopping you installing certain types of application and that’s just messy. 

It won’t run the current iPhone operating system either, although it will run most existing iPhone apps in smaller windows (almost like OS X dashboard widgets). My guess is that they’ll use the event to announce iPhone OS 4.0 with lots of cool new features including support for larger screen sizes. It makes perfect sense – everyone loves the iPhone OS. Users because it’s slick, fun and easy to use and Apple because of all the money they make from the App Store – why would they want to use Snow Leopard and not be able to control what software goes on there (and get a cut of it)."

Writing further about the device's harware, Hornsby reasons:

"Expectations are running pretty high for this one so I hope they get it right, although even if it’s nothing more than a giant iPod touch that would still be pretty cool! Let’s face it most of the iPod touch’s weakness would be fixed by a bigger screen. Yes, you can browse the web but it’s not ideal – I still find that I email myself links to look at on my real Mac with a big screen far too often. Yes, you can read digital comics but a panel at a time doesn’t quite do it for me either…"

As Hornsby notes, his firm has no inside sources and all that he has written is speculation. However, his reasoning on the hardware and OS sound pretty logical and it would be interesting to see if it turns out to be true. 

What do you think about the mockups? Let us know in the comments.

[Chilli X via Cult of Mac]