Although it’s amusing to think of a scenario in which the Internet threw a hype party for the a device that never came, it would be a sucker bet indeed to gamble that Apple won’tl announce a tablet-like device on January 27th. That said, the Tablet can’t be the only thing Apple has up its sleeves for Wednesday, and Hot Hardware is claiming that the media event will herald another much anticipated announcement from Apple: the end of AT&T iPhone exclusivity in the United States.

The rumor comes by way of an anonymous source within AT&T. They don’t have any details about what carriers we can expect to see the iPhone on if carrier exclusivity does indeed end, but according to Hot Hardware’s source, this might actually be a welcome development for AT&T, since having iPhone exclusivity has essentially crippled AT&T’s underdeveloped 3G network, with no end in sight. Although the iPhone has made AT&T incredibly profitable, it’s also generated such extreme bad press that their recent advertising efforts have been almost solely dedicated to fighting off network attacks.

Utter folly for a silicon company to rest on its laurels after the success of their last operating system, lest the competition pass you by. That goes doubly for Apple in the wake of Snow Leopard: although the latest version of OS X saw the highest upgrade rates yet for an Apple OS, 10.6 didn’t really add any new features into the mix, but was instead focused on tightening the engine bolts and preparing OS X for the future of multicore processors. That was an admirable, even revolutionary goal, but people are going to expect a lot more flash from 10.7.

It’s not surprising, then, that new reports are circulating, indicating that OS X 10.7 has been under development at Cupertino for the last couple of months. The first comes by way of the change database of the open source launchd framework, which specifically references the text astring “11A47” and seems to be the build number for the next version of OS X.

Well, it’s finally here: Tablet Week. Or, as I like to think of it, it’s time for there to be Just One More Thing. We all know how significant we expect this announcement to be. A major new advancement in computing, a killer device for a market that has failed time after time, and, just maybe, the last great breakthrough product of Steve Jobs’s amazing career.

All will be revealed on Wednesday, but since we’ve got to something in the interceding 60 hours, I’ve decided to go all in and actually make some bets on killer features for the Apple Tablet With No Name. They’re my best guess based on what we know about the existing tablet and eReader markets, soon-to-launch technologies, and past actions of Apple itself. I haven’t touched one, I haven’t talked to anyone who has, and the Apple employees I’ve seen in the last few weeks are people who know even less about the big secret project than I do.

Way back when the iPhone was the much-speculated upon Apple product of the future, I took the liberty to imagine a time when the iPhone would be a legitimate mobile gaming competitor, tackling Nintendo and Sony head-on. It was a fun bit of predictification back then, but it’s science fact today. The clearest evidence yet that Nintendo’s dominance of portable gaming might be threatened is Rockstar Games’ much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, an epic, multi-hour crime game that is deeper than anything I’ve seen on the iPhone to date.

We end the week with a motley group of Mac products, including software, hardware and iPhone bling. First up is an offer on Apple’s iLife ’09 productivity suite for $38. For those owners of older Mac min desktops wanting the latest SuperDrive, OWC has an upgrade, starting at $69. Finally, if you need a cover for your iPhone, there is a 30 percent off deal.

Along the way, we also look at storage options, cameras and HD televisions. As always, for details on these or many other items, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

We’ve been talking about an Apple tablet for years now, and of course, that chatter has boiled over into a frenzy that almost guarantees that Steve will walk on stage with something tablet-ish on the 27^th, if for no other reason than the fear of a near-nuclear backlash.

While we’re confident that this will be the greatest innovation in tablets since Moses brought a couple down from Mt. Sinai, that’s all we know. The Apple-Reality-Distortion-Echo-Chamber has progressed from being all a twitter with conflicting expectations to achieving some kind of pig-headed consensus that frankly has got to be totally wrong. Principal among these group-think features is the absurd notion that the Moses Tablet v2.0 will run an OS from a freekin’ Phone.

Follow us after the jump where we taunt the conventional wisdom, until they go home crying to momma.

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?”

Moodagent is one of those apps that seems like, at first glance, it’ll cure world hunger, or abruptly manifest all those single socks you’ve lost over the past seven years — a holy-crap,-I-just-gotta-have-this-app, app.

Sometimes I wake up from a dream where I’ve fashioned a majestic rock symphony. I’ll fumble around for my trusty digital recorder, groggily hum a few throaty bars and fall back asleep; then in the morning I find myself listening to something that sounds like a drowning donkey (or more frequently, I find I’ve forgotten to flip the “hold” switch).

Well, hell with that — for $3, I bought VoiceBand by WaveMachineLabs and turned my iPhone into a recording studio. What’s really cool is that all I have to do is vocalize into the mic and the app transforms my voice into a remarkably credible imitation of a musical instrument.

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review MetaSquares, Piyo Blocks Lite, Space Dock, Sky Force, PuzzlingsXXX.

Apple doesn’t seem likely to introduce Flash to the iPhone or iPod Touch anytime soon, and you can take it pretty much as read that the Apple Tablet will have the same limitation. That’s a pain for those who want to play Flash games (and, in fact, its the possible dilution of App Store sales numbers that is making Apple so reticent to incorporate Flash), but it also means that sites that use Flash to serve up video are inaccessible.

Given how strongly focused on video media the Tablet looks like it’s going to be, the majority of online video sites may simply not be ready for Apple’s newest product. But a solution is in sight: the HTML5 standard will actually serve streaming video without installing Adobe Flash on compatible browsers, including good old Safari.

Even better? Both YouTube and Vimeo have rolled out opt in, beta versions of their HTML5 video players, and they work excellently on Safari in the iPhone or iPod Touch.

There’s small enough smut worth bothering about on the App Store, but if you’re the type who worries that exposure to, say, the hypnotic iBoobz app could your child into a sex-crazed Onanist for life, you probably have sympathy for the problem facing the Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, Scotland.

The Cedars School wants to give iPod Touches to every one of their 100 students next fall. The only problem? Even though the iPhone OS has parental controls preventing kids from downloading apps rated 17+, you can still browse potentially illicit screenshots of these apps in iTunes.

In fact, the school is so alarmed by the fact that their students might be exposed to apps like Amateur Swimsuit , Movie of Sexy Japanese Girl and A Hidden Cam Thong that they are ready to disable Internet access to iTunes’ App Store schoolwide.

It all seems prudish, but silly or no, the school has an obligation to parents to filter their minor charges’ access for objectionable content, and it seems a strange oversight that Apple wouldn’t allow parental controls to be set across all sections of the iPhone app ecosystem.

Next week, crazed-eyed bloggers with their fingers a-blur will collectively tweet each and every minute of Steve Jobs’ keynote, regurgitating in small micro-blogging belches each and every detail of the unveiled Apple Tablet.

But imagine if Jobs himself could easily send out automated Twitter updates as he walked us through the Tablet’s specs, features, availability and price. Keynote Tweet is an open source Applescript that does just that, automatically tweeting the user-customizable summary of a slide as it is displayed.

It’s a fantastic idea. In fact, Apple should incorporate this sort of functionality into Keynote as standard: there’s more companies than just Apple who could raise awareness of their new products and services by automatically micro-blogging about them as they are unveiled.

[image, via TUAW]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pje8AQg8y3M

The Toronto District School Board decided to phase out Apple computers — about 8% of the 63,000 machines used by some 250,000 kids — in mid-November.

It seems board members bought in to the idea that Macs are more expensive than PCs:

“The Apple computer in a large-scale network―their capabilities for automatically managing that many machines really pales to what’s available in the PC world,” Lee Stem, general manager of Information and Technology Services for the Board, told Torontoist.

“At the end of the day, it really comes down to getting as many devices in the hands of as many people as possible,” added Stem. “Every penny that we save…all that money is going to bring more technology into the hands of kids.”

Teachers in the district are using those last Apple computers to plead with the bureaucrats to keep Macs in the mix.  (No more Apple computers will be bought for general use, though they may still be purchased for “special use” classes, like art, video editing or music composition.)

If visions of 3G networks tied in a knot by a deluge of frenzied tablet owners keeps you awake at night, fear not – at least not immediately after Apple’s rumored device makes its first appearance. Why so much calm? Experts predict a high price coupled with low initial adoption could give networks breathing space to prepare for the eventual onslaught.

Although Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu said earlier this week he expects a 3G cellular connection not be included to prevent further clogging “already strained” high-speed networks, others don’t agree. “I can’t imagine it not having it,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told All Thing Digital.

Although there is a frenzy of hype and curiosity surrounding Apple’s as-yet unseen tablet, it appears many consumers have a limit on how much they’ll pay to own the near-mythical device: $700. Seven in 10 people surveyed said they would not spend more than that amount for a tablet, according to a consumer research firm.

The amount seems to fall midway between $600 to $800, a figure that Piper Jaffray predicts could be the tablet’s selling point. Wall Street wisdom appears to peg the device at below $1,000. The eventual price tag could be lower if carriers agree to subsidize the cost. Reportedly, Apple is in discussions with AT&T and Verizon on a deal to offer the tablet.

Apple’s iPhone is gaining strides in both North America and Western Europe, quickly turning Nokia into a marginalized player leading only in Africa and Asia, a new survey of smartphone usage indicates.

The iPhone, with 40 percent of the market, represented 54 percent of smart phone usage in North America during the fourth quarter of 2009, according to AdMob, the mobile advertising firm Google acquired in last year. In Western Europe, the iPhone and the iPod touch comprised more than half of smart phone usage, the company said Thursday. The gains were at the expense of Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, the researchers said.

John Gruber’s favorite iPhone notepad app, Simplenote, got an updated earlier this week. From now on, it’s free and supported by advertising.

Gaines Kergosien filmed this amusing little interlude at Trevecca Nazarene University the other day.

A student politely asked Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to sign his Mac – and Ballmer genially played along.

Next week, Sergey and Larry will be doing guest slots in a “Get a Mac” ad, with Sergey as Mac and Larry as PC.

(Via The Guardian.)

Behold! The OfficePOD!

The OfficePOD gives you just over 4 square metres of space to swivel your chair and tap on your Mac keyboard. It comes with LED lighting, secure locks, and an electrical connection to your home. All you need to do is move yourself and your Mac inside, and you’re ready to work!

But what else does it have going for it?

Gary Snyder, a 79-year-old poet with roots in the Beat scene, lives in the tranquility of the Sierra Nevada foothills. He doesn’t spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley, and he hasn’t heard about the existence of the Apple tablet.

But he loves his Mac.

John Markoff of the New York Times got in touch with Snyder to chat about the latest from Apple, but what he got out of it was a new lens on the world. Or at least computing. Snyder allowed the Times to reprint, with permission, his poem “Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh.” You’ve got to head over to read the full thing, but just consider this line:

Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,

And it winks when it goes out,

Could not say it better myself. Is it Wednesday yet?

Our friend Seth Weintraub at 9to5Mac has written a great curtain raiser on the upcoming tablet. His lengthy posts covers everything you ever wanted to know about the tablet, including the likely surprises.

We especially like the way he starts by recalling the way Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone:

At the introduction of the iPhone, Steve Jobs touted that new device as a “Widescreen iPod”, “Revolutionary Mobile Phone” and “Breakthrough Internet Communications Device”.

I believe the same type of convergence thinking is going into the tablet. It can’t just be a “Kindle-killer” eBook reader. It can’t just be a “Media Pad”. It can’t be only a Nintendo DS or PSP competitor. It can’t just be a small NetBook-sized MacBook either. It has to be all of these things. At the same time. Say it together:

“The best eBook reader. The best Netbook. And the best portable media player and gaming device.”

Repeat.

Well worth reading the entire thing.

Unable to contain his excitement about the upcoming tablet, German blogger Richard Gutjahr has created 10 mock movie posters featuring the tablet, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer and other Silicon Valley stars.

There’s a couple more of Gutjah’s posters after the jump. The full “Top 10 Apple Tablet Movies (…yet to be made)” can be found on Richard’s blog.

Good news, not-so-good news on the tablet, according to a “double-sourced” story from iLounge:

Good News: The tablet will have two dock connectors, one on the bottom edge, the other on the side for charging/docking in both portrait and landscape mode. “… accessory companies have struggled for the past three years to figure out ways to accommodate Cover Flow and the like in their speakers and docks,” says iLounge EIC Jeremy Horwitz. “Two Dock Connectors fixes this, and depending on how Apple handles multiple accessory connections, could have some other nice benefits, as well.”

Horwitz also notes the tablet with an aluminum backplate with a wide plastic strip to enable clear radio reception for the device’s wireless antennae. The size of the strip “suggests room for nice-sized antennas, and 802.11n compatibility,” says Horwitz.

Not So Good News: The tablet will be offered with optional cell service, iLounge reckons, with data plans in the $30-$60 per month range. Curiously, iLounge thinks AT&T might offer a combined iPhone and tablet plan to attract  users already paying monthly iPhone data fees.

We start off with a new batch of App Store freebies from Apple, including the game Brain Balance Pro. You can never have too much spare juice when your iPhone’s battery is on its last legs. For such an occasion is Cable Unlimited’s Battery Boost. Finally, Apple’s iLife ’09 productivity suite on sale.

For details on these and many other items, check out CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.