iPad on Ulitzer

iPad on Ulitzer - There may be little left for Apple to announce about its purported tablet or iSlate come January 27, a date change since January 26 was noised about. The rumor mill is slowly teasing out all its secrets.

The great unveiling, according to the Financial Times, is still supposed to be at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco but now it’s supposedly on the last Wednesday of the month rather than the last Tuesday.

The Wall Street Journal came running out late Monday with the news – shared by “people briefed by the company” – that Apple won’t start delivering the widget until March, another date previously reported.

The New York Times says the same thing. It also said there “hasn’t been this much hype about a tablet since Moses came down from the mountain.”

The Journal says it heard the dingus will have a netbook-like diagonal 10- to 11-inch screen, putting it at odds with those who claim it’s more like seven inches but apparently confirming what others said right after Christmas and the former head of Google China Kai-Fu Lee said on his personal blog. The Journal allows that Apple could come out with multiple versions at different price points although it guided towards roughly a thousand bucks, “possibly including a subscription to a nationwide Wi-Fi wireless service.”

It’s convinced the device will be multi-purpose and let users watch movies and TV shows, play games, surf the web and read e-books, textbooks and whatever’s left of newspapers.

There’s been some debate over whether the thing’s a full-fledged computer or only a big iPod Touch. The former would mean it could run Windows 7 and coveted Windows apps. And at a thousand bucks a pop it better be a computer – true even at the ~$800 Gismodo’s saying.

Apple Inside thinks the tablet’s touch screen keyboard will have a tactile, Braille-like feel based on a newly discovered patent. A boon for people who touch-type.

DigiTimes says Foxconn, which already makes iPods and iPhones, is gonna make the thing.

Australia’s Smarthouse says Google will follow with an Android-based tablet – others say the Chrome OS – made and sold by HTC that’s built around a Qualcomm processor and some newfangled Adobe software.

Phone Arena, a blog few have heard of, claims to be quoting Apple internal documents in saying the Apple device is built on a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo chip. We think not. To Intel’s chagrin Apple’s iPhone uses an ARM chip and the tablet may too but maybe Apple is using its 2008 PA Semi acquisition for the tablet. PA did power-efficient PowerPCs before it got bought. Goodness knows what it’s doing now.

Otherwise Phone Arena claims the tablet can support 2GB-8GB of RAM with a 120GB SATA drive and has a webcam, two USB ports, an SD slot, stereo speakers, gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and an operating system called Mac OS X Clouded Leopard 10.7.

It also says it will include iTunes, Time Machine, Quick Look, Spaces, Spotlight, Dashboard, Mail, iChat, Safari of course, Address Book, QuickTime, iCal, Photo Booth and Front Row.

It says the touch screen won’t show fingerprints.