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A Day Late, A Tablet Short (1/4/02)
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By the way, if Steve doesn't unveil an "iPad" or some form of tablet-style, pen-driven Mac slate on Monday, it looks like Microsoft will get to enjoy the lion's share of the press attention next week. See, faithful viewer Nina Tovish happened to stumble across what is in all likelihood the real reason why Uncle Steve moved his keynote from Tuesday to Monday: according to InfoWorld, Bill Gates is delivering another keynote on Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show. (By the way, if you've heard the rumor that Steve was also going to keynote at CES, we should let you know that the Mac Show proved it wrong with a three minute phone call to the show's organizers. Darn that investigative journalism.)
And what is Bill expected to show? The Viewsonic AirPanel 150, a flat-screen wireless monitor that pops out of a docking station and allows users to carry it around. It works a little like a tablet PC, in the sense that users will apparently be able to use the detached panel with some sort of input system as a wireless "thin client" terminal. In other words, if you get sick of working at your desk, you could grab your screen and a stylus, carry it into the living room, plop down on the couch, and keep right on working wirelessly. Yes, you could also do this with a laptop, but that's so '90s. Get with the times.
What's particularly intriguing about this development is the fact that Apple has long been rumored to have a similar technology in the works, and you may recall whispers of an LCD iMac whose screen was actually a removable thin-client webpad thingy. Most recently, faithful viewer Greg Hill informed us that a mention of this sort of product just showed up at Dave Winer's Scripting.com: "I've heard about the iDock, which is a flat-screen on an 802.11a network that moves your desktop anywhere you want to work in the home." In other words, it's the AirPanel 150, only Apple's version.
If this is indeed one of the things that Steve intends to unveil in the course of his keynote address, you can imagine the ickiness that might have ensued had he taken the wraps off of this alleged "iDock" on the very same day as Bill Gates was demonstrating the AirPanel to a different keynote audience. Likewise, though, you can imagine how much fun it would be for Steve to give us the iDock one day before Bill does his AirPanel thing. That's not just stealing someone's thunder; that's stomping said thunder into little tiny thunder pieces. Now that will be worth watching.
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 1/4/02 episode: January 4, 2002: Three days 'til Expo: so what's on the agenda? Meanwhile, a quick search of the trademark database indicates that Gigawire might be rather different than we initially expected, and there's a possibility that Steve moved his keynote up a day to beat Bill Gates to the punch on a wireless tablet unveiling...
Other scenes from that episode: 3485: The 3-Day Stevenote List (1/4/02) Welp, it's the last weekday before the Big Day, and in light of the fact that a lot of people had their Stevenote prognosticative radar knocked severely out of whack by that goofy iWalk hoax, we figured we should do a last chance wrap-up of the various bits and pieces expected to accompany Steve onstage come Monday... 3486: That's GigaWHAT, Now? (1/4/02) Okay, okay, we lied-- we're not all speculated out. We've got a little more juice left when it comes to guessing at the "big thing" that Steve's got crammed up his sleeve for Monday's hoedown...
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