Apple tablet rumour round-up — T minus two weeks and counting…

As the countdown to the rumoured end-of-January Apple event ticks down to zero, yet more rumours are starting to circulate about what Steve Jobs will be pulling out of his (probably metaphorical) back pocket.

On the tablet/slate front, there are reports that Apple has been buying up stocks of 10” screens of both the LCD and OLED variety. The news comes from tech site TG Daily, who quotes a disgruntled anonymous source from the CES show floor as saying:

We were designing a product for a customer and we needed 10-inch screens, but we've been trying for months and can't get one from any of the Asian suppliers. We were told that Apple pre-ordered them all. All 10" LCDs, and all 10" OLEDs too.

That sounds like an awful lot of 10” screens to take delivery of, but Apple has been known to hoover up other components — flash memory for its iPhone and iPod Touch, for example. Even so, a 10” OLED screen is almost certainly too expensive for any mobile device that Apple could sell in large numbers (the Sony XEL-1 11” OLED TV sells for around $2,500), so we don’t put too much stock in this report.

Some more sensible speculation can be found at Gizmodo, where John Herrman has been pondering how Apple might have solved the input problem for a tablet computer. As he points out, a scaled-up version of the iPhone on-screen keyboard almost certainly won’t cut it on a 10” screen — it’s just too large for two-thumbed typing with a tablet held in two hands.

The post runs through the various options open to Apple, from voice control to stylus input to something completely new based on technology developed by FingerWorks. Apple acquired FingerWorks five years ago and until then, the company was selling multi-touch based input systems for Macs.

Interestingly, the old FingerWorks web site was still online until a few weeks ago, but it suddenly went offline this week. Mysterious, eh..?

John Gruber has also chipped in on the France Telecom tease from Monday. Deputy CEO Stéphane Richard made an offhand remark about a hypothetical Apple tablet with a built-in camera for video calls, but Gruber reckons that the device will lack a camera of any kind.

Finally, if all these Apple tablet rumours are getting you down, don’t worry — the Apple iPhone rumour mill has now started! The first round reckons that the iPhone ‘4G’ could be with us by April this year and will have an OLED screen, video chat, dual-core processor, better graphics and even a removable battery. Put us down for a definite “Hm…” for that one.

We'll spare you any more speculation on new Apple products umtil next week — unless something juicy turns up before then, of course...