Apple Tablet concept

With Apple’s tablet ready to be announced this Wednes­day, I thought I would put in my thoughts. The tablet is sure to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the way we read, watch, and com­mu­ni­cate, but unless they do some­thing truly spe­cial I don’t know many peo­ple that will spend $800 or up on what will likely be their third or fourth gad­get (next to their iMac, Mac­Book, iPod, etc.)

I’d like to take a look at a poten­tial fea­ture that isn’t get­ting a lot of recog­ni­tion and that might explain how Apple is going to make the tablet as big as the iPhone. The tablet is likely to be con­sid­er­ably faster com­pared with even the next-gen iPhone and it’s graph­ics core should be able to out­put high def­i­n­i­tion video and graph­ics. This seems to me an ideal plat­form for a game con­sole. Just hook it up to your HDTV and con­nect to the tablet via your iPhone or iPod Touch. If you don’t have an HDTV, that’s fine, just set your tablet in a dock and it becomes the dis­play. The phone that you’ve been using for a year or two has sud­denly become the ulti­mate game con­troller with far more fea­tures than a Wiimote. And with rumors that the 4G iPhone will have a touch sen­si­tive back cas­ing, your fin­gers won’t even get in the way of the screen.

Imag­ine the pos­si­bil­i­ties: Trivia, board games, emu­la­tors, and my per­sonal favorite D&D. The dun­geon mas­ter holds the tablet and sets up all the rooms and mon­sters, and each mem­ber of the party con­trols their actions via iPhone. These are just off the top of my head so it’s not a stretch to imag­ine that game devel­op­ers are going to really blow our minds. And it was revealed today that Apple has already invited many mem­bers of the gam­ing indus­try to it’s Wednes­day the 27th event.

Even if my spec­u­la­tion is incor­rect, I’ve got my fin­gers crossed for a major gam­ing push from Apple. Sev­eral blogs will be live-blogging the media event includ­ing Giz­modo and Mac Rumors . So if you share my mind numb­ing affin­ity with all things Apple, I’ll see you in cyber­space next Wednesday.