In a moment that had to make the top brass at Cupertino cringe, McGraw Hill CEO Terry McGraw tipped Apple’s hand during a interview on CNBC. In response to a question about Apple’s Tablet, he seemed to confirm the heretofore secret device:
“Yeah, Very exciting. Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable. So what you are going to be able to do now — we have a consortium of e-books. And we have 95% of all our materials that are in e-book format on that one. So now with the tablet you’re going to open up the higher education market, the professional market. The tablet is going to be just really terrific.”
From this answer, we can pick up two things about an Apple Tablet. One, it will use iPhone OS, so it will utilize either all or a portion of the thousands of iPhone apps out there. Second, as expected, e-books will be a big part of the experience.
Gadget hounds are excited about the prospects of a full-color e-book reader with a larger screen. For some, the iPhone and iPod Touch fit the bill for a e-book reader with a color screen, but the small size of the device makes reading more difficult. Laptops can also be used to read e-books, but the keyboard makes holding them awkward.
The tablet seems to find the happy medium between smartphones and laptops in the e-book reader space, but there’s still one issue that it wouldn’t solve. That’s the screen glare that makes reading uncomfortable on most color screens. Because of this, dedicated e-book readers like the Kindle have become popular. They use black and white e-ink screens, which are easier on the eyes.
Source: MacRumors