Speculating the Apple Tablet’s Interface

This coming Wednesday, Apple is holding an event in San Francisco where it’s expected to make a couple of big announcements. Even Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, has been clear that there’s something big on the horizon by saying, “We’re starting this week with a major new product“. Even if you don’t follow Apple news too closely, you’d pretty much have to be cut off from the world for the past few months to not know that the product Steve is talking about is the “Apple Tablet”.

I’ll admit that I can’t see myself ever personally using a tablet, and I’ve had good debates in the past with friends to explain why that’s the case, but the fact is, Apple’s proposed tablet is beyond hyped, and I’d have to expect that it’s for a reason. Is the world ready for a real tablet, one that offers an innovative design and superb ease-of-use? TechCrunch’s CrunchPad might have been close to fulfilling that, but it looks like Apple could be the first out the door with the first truly compelling offering.

There’s good reason to be excited for the Apple Tablet, even if you don’t have great interest in owning one. Apple is not the type of company who releases a product without first doing an insane amount of research and development, so we could likely expect that its tablet will feature things no one was expecting. One of those things that has been speculated heavily over the past month or so is the UI that the device may use.

One major fault with tablets of old is that nothing much has been done with the actual interface. Most often, the OS used is nothing more than a copy of Windows, usually modified with a few add-on programs to make use of hand-writing, gestures and other tablet-esque features. But, Gizmodo believes that the Apple Tablet won’t be running a standard version of Apple’s flagship OS, OS X, but rather simplify things enough in order to make the tablet easy to use for anyone, no matter their experience level.

It makes sense, too, because there’s a reason that the iPhone and iPod touch are so popular. They were both designed with ease-of-use in mind, and even the tech novices out there can get a lot done with it. Sure, there are some faults, but it’s rare to see any problem large enough that would cause someone to ditch their iPhone or iPod. The writeup at Gizmodo here is large, but I recommend it if you are curious about the progress of UI’s, and the possible UI that may grace the Apple Tablet. I am not a fan of tablets as I mentioned, but I can’t help but be intrigued.

With these four key problems solved, whatever extra Apple adds—like extra gestures—is just icing on the iPhone user interface cake that so many consumers find so delicious. The important thing here is that the fabled Apple Tablet won’t revolutionize the computing world on its own. It may become what the Mac was to the command-line computers, but the revolution already started with the iPhone.