The rumors of the Apple tablet just won’t die. Each time an event is close or someone hints at a new product from Apple, speculation and rumors start anew. An analyst this week released a new research note that claims the Apple table its only months away.
The analyst was Yair Reiner from Oppenheimer. Reiner wrote in a research note that information gleaned for the Apple supple chain indicated that manufacturing partners are ramping up for the Apple tablet. The scuttlebutt is that the tablet could hit in March or April.
Other analysts say that they believe Apple is working on a tablet, but when it will be released is anyone’s guess. Steve Jobs is known to be a perfectionist and demanding of his team. Walter Luh from Ansca Mobile said, “Until the project sees the light of day, it’s never a foregone conclusion. Steve Jobs demands perfection and if he’s not happy with it, it’s not going to ship.”
Luh goes on to say that with the tablet predicted to be coming that developers need to be looking at writing their apps with an eye towards larger screens. Luh told InformationWeek, “How I expect it to work is that as a developer we’ll get the option to either keep our iPhone-sized window or to dynamically scale to take up the extra room. Some apps, such as a news reader or a Web browser, will probably be able to scale easily, while other apps, notably like ours that make very careful artwork and UI decisions based on the exact dimensions of the iPhone screen, cannot simply stretch to fit.”
Some app developers believe that the guidance from Apple at the Dev convention to represent screen dimensions as variables rather than specific numbers is an indication of things to come. Apple will want games and other apps to take full advantage of any larger screen device.
