Here’s some sensible tablet speculation from UK app developer Dave Hornsby of Chilli X.
A levelheaded Englishman, Hornsby reckons the tablet will be a big iPod touch running iPhone OS 4.0, which is basically the iPhone OS with support for larger screen sizes.
Hornsby doesn’t have any special knowledge of what Steve Jobs will release next week. He’s just thinking aloud. Here’s his reasoning:
“It won’t be running Snow Leopard – there’s no point putting the same operating system that people use to do high end rendering and print ready artwork on a small, less powerful device. If it was to run Snow Leopard then Apple would have to figure out a way of stopping you installing certain types of application and that’s just messy.
It won’t run the current iPhone operating system either, although it will run most existing iPhone apps in smaller windows (almost like OS X dashboard widgets). My guess is that they’ll use the event to announce iPhone OS 4.0 with lots of cool new features including support for larger screen sizes. It makes perfect sense – everyone loves the iPhone OS. Users because it’s slick, fun and easy to use and Apple because of all the money they make from the App Store – why would they want to use Snow Leopard and not be able to control what software goes on there (and get a cut of it).”
Hornsby figured it would be fun to imagine what his iPhone apps would look like blown up to tablet size. See the fantastic mockups above.
“Imagine what we could do with all these extra pixels,” says Hornsby. “So we’ve used some of our existing apps as a starting point and mocked up these images showing the type of app we’d like to build. Imagine a combination of PhotoFrame, DeskClock and PlaySafe – what do you think?”
