Apple confirms 27 January event, plus our tablet rumour roundup

We’re a day early with our weekly Apple tablet rumour roundup (see last week's), but only because Apple has thrown a spanner in the works by confirming one of them.

Apple sent out invitations late yesterday for an ‘event’ to be held on Wednesday 27 January at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco — an even that’s hardly been a secret for the last few weeks, but this is the first official confirmation.

The invitation doesn’t give much away — it just has a mess of spray-painted colours, an Apple logo and the words “Come see our latest creation”.

As you might expect, the precise meaning of the invitation has been the subject of much debate, but we’ve yet to see any insightful analysis of the particular colours Apple has chosen, the diameter of the spray-painted blobs or the fact that the Apple logo is surrounded by orange. Does it mean anything at all? Does this meaningless mean anything? Oh, we give up.

OLED or not OLED? That is the question...

The last week has seen plenty of further speculation about what Apple is planning to announce on the 27th, though. That it’s a tablet or slate (i.e. a large screen without a keyboard) now seems to be a foregone conclusion, but last week’s rumours of it having a 10.1” OLED screen have been pretty much quashed.

Ars Technica published a well-researched piece that essentially discounted the idea that Apple was stockpiling 10.1” OLED screens for one unavoidable reason — there aren’t enough 10.1” OLED screens to stockpile.

Barry Young, Managing Director of the OLED Association, stated that no one is really producing OLED displays of this size without a specific order, unlike more common 13.3” or 14” sizes. OLED production limitations also mean that even if manufacturers worked flat-out at producing 10.1” panels at the expense of every other size, they could still only churn out 150,000 a month — not enough for Apple’s needs.

This still doesn’t rule out a device with a 10.1” screen, of course, it’s just that the screen almost certainly won’t be OLED.

Patent pending

Some digging through Apple’s various patents has also turned up some interesting information about multi-touch and user interfaces. Mobile Crunch published one patent that covered a method of ‘writing’ on a touch-screen using a pinched thumb and forefinger (imagine holding a pen, only without the pen), and another that allowed a touch-screen to distinguish between a hand simply resting on it and a finger actively using it.

Patently Apple (geddit?) also published some detailed analysis of further Apple patents for gesture controls on a touch-screen device. These cover such things as floating on-screen controls and page turning, plus touch-sensitive areas on the rear of a device that would appear to allow the fingers of both hands to perform certain tasks without touching the screen.

Another Apple patent covers a tablet device with a split screen — half for a keyboard, half for a display. This arrangement would allow a tablet device to be used much like a traditional laptop and the prediction is that Apple is already working on a new version of its iWork office suite for touch-screen use. This idea does conflict with long-time Apple pundit John Gruber's ideas about what Apple is cooking up for a tablet though, but we wouldn't be surprised to see it on a large touch-screen device.

Pressing print

The speculation about Apple teaming up with various newspaper and magazine publishers for a tablet device also appears to be coalescing. This started with the New York Times announcing that it will be moving to a paid model for its web site shortly and some suspect that the timing of this announcement is no coincidence — not least since its executive editor Bill Keller recently told staff that he was “hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate..."

The Wall Street Journal also reported that publishing company HarperCollins is also in talks with Apple about making its ebooks available on its tablet device, but the piece is thin on facts and quotes “people familiar with the situation” as the source.

And finally...

Finally, Fox News weighed in with what it thinks will be announced next Wednesday. Citing a “source at Apple”, the piece predicts that Apple will unveil a tablet device, the iPhone 4.0 operating system and a new version of its iLife creative suite. The latter prediction would tie neatly with the “creation” mentioned on Apple’s invitation, particularly if it’s a tablet-enabled version of the suite.

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