Now that he’s back at work full-time, Steve Jobs is focusing his full attention on the Apple tablet, the Wall Street Journal reports. And he’s kickin ass!

“Mr. Jobs’s focus on the tablet has been jarring for some Apple employees, who had grown accustomed to a level of freedom over strategy and products while the CEO was on leave, said a person familiar with the matter. “People have had to readjust” to Mr. Jobs being back, this person said.”

This is excellent news. Nothing is better for Apple products than Jobs throwing a fit over them. It’s such an important part of the cooking process.

Also important is the ritual killing of the project during the development process. Almost every major project at Apple has been killed before it was started over, from the iMac to Apple’s retail stores. Killing a project and starting over is Jobs’s MO. The Journal says Jobs has already killed the tablet twice. The first time because the battery life was too short, and the second time because “there was insufficient memory,” the Journal says. (This last one’s a puzzler. Presumably it refers to solid-state memory (SSD hard drives), which until recently have been pricey. Perhaps earlier prototypes used SSD drives that were too small and crippled the device?)

Though the Journal report uncovers few new details, it does say that Jobs is currently working on the tablet’s advertising and marketing — which suggests the tablet’s launch is imminent. The Journal has no time line though: “The people familiar with the matter declined to give details on the tablet or disclose when the device would come out.“

Also, it’s stating the obvious, but the Journal notes that Jobs’s focus on the tablet is a clear sign of its importance. Although Apple has released several important pieces of hardware recently, the last product to get Jobs’s full attention was the prototype iPhone back in 2006/2007.

The report doesn’t detail what OS the device will run, which is perhaps the key unanswered question. Nor does it name the price: It’s somewhere between $399 and $999, the Journal helpfully reports.

Jobs is also recovering well from his liver transplant, the Journal says. “People close to Apple said Mr. Jobs is still thin as he recovers from the liver transplant, but his health has improved significantly.”

Good news all round.

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As flash memory and solid state drives steadily become the storage media of choice for portable electronic devices, Apple’s iPod Classic – the device widely credited with kickstarting the company’s rise from the ashes of the John Scully era – may not survive to celebrate its 10th birthday in 2011.

1.8 inch hard disk drives manufactured by Samsung and Toshiba, the last two manufacturers standing in a once-robust market for small, high-capacity spinning disk drives, sit languishing in the supply channel, according to a report at Ars Technica, and industry trends do not bode well for the future of Apple’s signature gadget.

When Apple launched the first iPod in 2001, the hard disk was the only vehicle capable of storing large amounts of data flexibly at reasonable cost. Since then, however, advances in Flash memory and SSD technology have made those two storage options the industry standard for everything from netbooks to iPhones and the entire line of Apple’s portable music players, with only the Classic continuing to rely on the 1.8″ HDD.

The trend toward Flash memory and SSD technology has been building for at least the last couple of years, with Apple having been ahead of the curve when the company introduced its Flash memory-based iPod nano in 2005.

SSDs typically offer higher performance–often much higher performance–than hard-disk drives and are more durable since they have no moving parts. While the larger question of where the technology is headed remains somewhat in debate, in large part over concerns about data’s long-term reliability in SSD storage media and Flash memory’s eventual degradation related to writing, erasing and re-writing its memory blocks, the fate of the 1.8 inch HDD seems dire.

The industry’s current disdain for small-form HDD products, and Apple’s apparent design trajectory for its mobile PMPs and handset devices, suggest the time has come to prepare farewells for the iPod Classic.

Today’s deals include a back-to-school sale on Macs, refurbished unibody MacBooks starting at $949, refurbished MacBook Pros and many more.

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About a week ago, MacFormat posted a partial image of a mysterious Apple device “without comment”, saying it had been submitted anonymously by email.

It was just a tease, though, as MacFormat Illustrator Adam Benton had submitted via email his case for what you see here, a full-fledged Apple Media Pad, Cupertino’s answer to the world of netbooks.

In Benton’s conception, “Your entire Home folder – all docs, photos, movies and music – would live ‘in the cloud’ on Apple’s servers. Regularly used files would be cached locally, but the system would enable you to keep files in sync between the tablet and your desktop Macs, whilst getting away with a smaller SSD.”

Benton’s idea calls for a that dock would support USB and FireWire, plus Mini DisplayPort, and Bluetooth to be used for peripherals like headsets and keyboards. The OS would be the iPhone and iPod touch OS, scaled up to support the larger display, with integrated 3G connectivity – proper 7.2Mb/sec HSUPA – to keep users connected to Apple’s servers at all times.

See more details at MacFormat and start checking that secondary market for WWDC keynote tickets.

Image © Hugo Lala. Used with permission.

Hugo Lala has a vision for Apple’s much rumored netbook. “Imagine…,” he says:

Dual touchscreen with multiple configurations for the bottom display:

– keyboard + “touchpad”
– multitrack audio mixer
– dj “turntable”
– accelerometer

2 X 10″ touchscreen
wifi: 802.11n
Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1,86 GHz
2 Go SDRAM DDR3
128 Go SSD
SuperDrive DVD (hope it fit in this)
NVIDIA GeForce 9400M
Webcam
Mini DisplayPort
Microphone
Speaker
audio output
2 X USB
1 X FireWire 800

Lala says his netbook would have at least 5 hours of useful battery life and the accelerometer in both screens to allow for reading ebooks in vertical mode with facing pages, just like a real book.

A feature called “Now Playing,”  launched in  fall 2007,  allowed latte-sippers to wander into a Starbucks, log onto the iTunes Store with a laptop, iPod Touch or iPhone and instantly see what song was playing in-store, plus browse and buy music on iTunes.

Unwired View found a patent Apple filed for a similar feature.
The basic idea: place a local cache of iTunes media store server at a retail location and follow the music played from that cache. The associated info is beamed to iPhones and Macbooks via local Wi-Fi network.

Apple envisions lots of in-store tie-ins and cross selling thanks to the feature.

From the patent application:
“One advantage of the invention is that patrons of establishments can dynamically receive store-based information while at the establishments. Store-based information facilitates user experience and can also facilitate locating associated media content from an online media store.

In store-based information can be displayed on a patron’s portable electronic device while the patron in the store… The online media store can coordinate with central management to make store-based information centrally stored and accessible…”

Via Unwired View