All-in-One Media Tablet or E-Ink Book Reader(poll)

Like, I could see actually wanting this Maemo-powered slab of Finnish tablet. [BeGeek, BeGeek]

That’s a 13-centimetre touchscreen with an impressive 800 x 480 resolution. And internally, a 533/667MHz ARM 11-based Samsung 6410 chip should run the device as quickly as any smartphone with codec support including AAC, OGG, DivX, XviD, and H.264.

Storage stays light by maxing at 8GB, but a miniSD card slot offers lots of expansion. Wi-Fi and GPS are standard.

Sadly, even if you were to import the thing, you wouldn’t be able to take advantage of CMMB mobile TV broadcast support (DVB intended for the Chinese market). But such is life.

So is the MID-560 our mystery MID? Maybe, but it’s tough to confirm given that we only have a low-end render. And Pocketables, the source of the original shots, is still not convinced. [SMiT via Shanzai]

We don’t know what they may be, but this is enough to give our tablet probability meter a 5% boost. [Ars Technica]

As far as I’m concerned, I’ve wanted a son of Newton since Jobs cancelled it, and I’ve been gagging for it since the iPhone. The latest solid rumour came from the Financial Times, which claimed that the entertainment industry “is hoping that Apple, which revolutionised the markets for music players and phones, can do it again with the new device.” Suggesting it will be more giant iPod touch (good—as the iPod touch could scale up into new form factors) than pure Mac OS X Tablet (bad—as pure Mac OS X will be hard to scale down). A project with the music industry—codenamed Cocktail—will be announced in September, according to this source. The same sources point that “the device could be launched alongside the new content deals.”

The Financial Times article is vague about this, however, mentioning Apple “racing” to have the tablet available for the holiday shopping season. That may mean an announcement in September, followed by availability after Thanksgiving. That’s four months away. Another article—this time from the China Times—points at an October release, which puts the thingamajig only three months away. And yet another Chinese paper claims a September or October release. Apple Insider claims that it will be available in 2010.

I’m personally inclined to trust the Financial Times rumour. Not only because of them being so adamant about their multiple sources, but because the timing makes a lot more sense than the other options. It also makes sense to announce it in this entertainment event, which will most probably include announcements for the updated nano and touch—minor updates for already-established products that only add cameras, confirmed by a myriad of new cases from China.

The big bang, however, could be the newest member of the iPod/iPhone family: The Apple Tablet. Like the iPhone—which was originally announced alongside other products during a MacWorld keynote—the Tablet won’t cannibalise any existing product sales, so it makes sense to drum up the hype like they did with the iPhone, building excitement for the shopping season.

Matt, on the other hand, thinks that the device could be announced on an event on its own. His rationale is that it’s too important to be released alongside other products. To me it makes more sense to tell the public that, while big—literally and metaphorically speaking—this is “another iPod”, and the third model of a new family of iPhone OS-based products—a potential family which, incidentally, has been hinted by Jobs and the rest of the Apple executive team.

Whenever it is actually announced, however, the general consensus is that the tablet exists—even John Gruber is certain about it, and he rarely fails. The question now is when. According to our Apple Tablet Probability Meter, you’re 80% likely to be able to buy one in four months.

AppleInsider says that Dow Jones carried the report as well, though it comes from a paper less well-known than say, DigiTimes. The September or October launch date Apple Daily reports is slightly more aggressive and definite in its time table than the Financial Times report that came out this weekend, which simply said that Apple “racing to offer a portable, full-featured, tablet-sized computer in time for the Christmas shopping season.”

A morbid thought, but if Foxconn is building the tablet, what if the tablet was the prototype Sun Danyong lost before he was driven to suicide? They wouldn’t say he lost the mythical Apple tablet, after all.

AppleInsider still thinks it’s coming in 2010, for what it’s worth. We still think never trust rumours. [AppleInsider]

It’s not even worth getting into everything that goes wrong here, and anyway, it’ll detract from the joy of unpeeling this sad onion of misapprehension on your own. Of course, when I get my first handwritten eeelectronic photo-mail from my grandmother’s “Tablet Mac” I will feel like such an arse.—Special thanks to Gawker’s crack video-mining team.

Price: $US499

Verdict: Have you ever wanted to touch Windows XP? No? There’s a pretty good reason for that—it’s a really crummy touch experience, even with slightly larger-than-usual buttons. It’s kind of like trying to poke poke poke around Windows Mobile 5 with a stylus. (This is at least partly because the T91 is running standard Windows XP Home, not Windows XP Tablet edition.) The “touch optimised” Internet Explorer is a joke. That’s okay, Asus knows all of this too, so they’ve included their own custom interface that sits on top of XP called Touch Gate.

The UI is glossy and glowy and widgety—lighting effects, reflections and giant buttons abound. It can be impressively smooth in action, given how dinky the T91’s guts are (1.33GHz Atom Z520). It has its own apps inside, like a flashy photo program, notepad for scribbling, and internet radio. There’s widget desktop inside as well. You can move between the TouchGate homescreen, widgets desktop and Windows XP by flicking left or right. It’s confusing and annoying though—why can you only have five programs on the Touch Gate homescreen? To get to other apps, you have to move a slider sitting below to “unlock” the rest of the apps, which pop up in a semi-circle. From there, you can launch one, or trade out the apps that appear on your homescreen.

But let’s just cut to it: I’m just not sure why anyone would want this, barring other third party apps you’d install that would unleash the potential of the tablet. (Which is perfectly adequate from a hardware standpoint—the touchscreen is pretty accurate with the stylus after calibration.) With the exception of being able to literally scribble notes and some whizbang photo flick gestures, there’s nothing you can accomplish with Asus’s custom widget OS overlay you couldn’t do on a regular netbook with a regular Windows XP build. And a glorified app launcher for a handful of custom apps + a widget desktop that essentially exist just to lie on top of Windows XP to make touch actually usable aren’t exactly compelling reasons to spring for a tablet, especially when more often than not, the experience simply frustrates because the software seems to misinterpret what you intended a tap to mean.

If there’s a specific reason you want a Windows XP tablet with a crampy screen that doubles as decent last-gen netbook with a crampy screen, then for $US500, the T91 might be your ticket. But if you’re just aching for a cheap touchscreen tablet to dick around on the internet, you’d be better off waiting for the $US300 CrunchPad. The T91 was much better as the glimmer of hope in our eye at CES.

Asus custom touch interface is flashy without bogging down system too much

Touch is accurate after calibration-provided you use the included stylus

It’s half tablet, half last-gen netbook

Windows XP + touch is not the good kind of touch

In the age of 10-inch netbooks, the 8.9-inch screen is weenie-sized

Which is more telling than it would seem, actually, if true. From what we’ve seen of PA Semi’s activities in Apple, they’re working on ARM chips—the same kind of chip that’s in most mobile phones.

It’s possible they’re working on other chip designs, but given what we’ve heard previously, it seems to suggest the possibility that the tablet could be running on ARM chips, along with the iPhone and iPod touch. ARM scales pretty well, but if the tablet was using ARM, it’d suggest something closer to a netbook in power, not the MacBook Pro Touch that Jesus strokes himself to sleep every night dreaming about. Which incidentally, would fit neatly under the recently entirely Pro-ified notebook lineup.

But you know what we say about rumours: Never trust them. [Venture Beat]