If the forthcoming Apple Tablet does indeed run on the iPhone operating system, which seems likely, it stands to reason that it’ll be a major evolution of the OS, with new multitouch gestures and features that will selectively trickle down to the smaller handsets, even as the app format is expanded to a sort-of “universal binary” system to allow one executable to run on two significantly different hardware conditions.
If that’s all true, then it’s no wonder that Apple is sitting on the release of the next update to the iPhone OS until after the Tablet is officially announced. A source speaking to iPodNN has now confirmed that that is indeed the case: while the iPhone 4.0 firmware is in deep internal testing, it hasn’t been released to developers because there are too many references in current builds to functionality of Apple’s upcoming tablet.
Other than that, iPodNN’s source is tight lipped, but goes on to describe the tablet as an “iPhone on steroids” with multi-touch gestures that are “out of control.” He also claims the internal model number of the Apple tablet is K48AP, running an extremely fast ARM CPU, designed by PA Semi.
