The Apple Tablet; clicking like Lego
Ahhh, the Apple Tablet.
It’s going to revolutionise computing. It’s going to come packed with a free spaceship. It’s a window to peer backwards through time and alter the present. It comes with Wonkavision, so you can reach in and grab anything off eBay you fancy. It’s actually built from Sport Billy technology, so it shrinks to become a regular iPhone…
Well, no matter what it can do, a lot of the conversation so far has been about where it fits into folk’s lives. Would it replace the desktop computer, or the laptop, or the TV… or just aspects of all of these, but not as well..?
Well, here’s a thought; what if it took a trick out the Lego book, and the device as you see it above is just one brick… that can connect up to other bricks.
But don’t think of it as one whole device, but two blocks.
The first block is your Apple tablet. It can operate on it’s on, with the touchscreen, but you can then just slot it together with the keyboard element, and hey presto, you’ve got a laptop again.
Or think about a small television on a stand, like you might have in a bedroom or kitchen…
Again, the stand, the receiver, the hard drive with all your stored programmes are just other ‘blocks’ that you click a screen onto.
Of course, the laptop ‘docking station’ approach has been around for a while, and while I was looking around on t’net for an image, I found this patent filed by Apple back in 2008 (via Cybernet News, specced up by Gizmodo).
The supposition at the time was that it “looks like a typical Apple iMac screen base in which you would be able to dock one of those ultra thin and light laptops rumored by sliding it in right through the side of the screen. It would presumably fit completely inside of the monitor.”
But what if it was never meant to ‘fit completely inside of the monitor.
What if it WAS the monitor…
