“He’s got the scars and the great ideas.”

– A former Apple employee on Newton developer Michael Tchao, who’s returning to Apple after a 15-year absence, presumably to work on the company’s rumored tablet device

For one thing, the Microsoft (MSFT) device is a booklet, not a tablet; in other words, it’s designed to fold. For another, it supports input via multitouch and, in an ironic nod to Apple’s Newton, stylus.

From Gizmodo, which somehow managed to uncover a bevy of information about the device:

“The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a ‘pocket’ to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft’s tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we’ve seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.”

Q: Will there be an iPhone?
Steve Jobs: One never knows. We don’t usually discuss products we haven’t announced.
Q: What do you think of the tablet PC?
Jobs: We’re not sure the tablet PC will be successful. It’s turned into a notebook that you can write on. Do you want to handwrite all your email? We have all the technology ourselves to do that–we just don’t know whether it will be successful.”

–Interview with Apple CEO Steve Jobs, International Herald Tribune, Sept. 2002

Are you passionate about providing handwriting solutions to end customers? Do you strongly believe that using a stylus and a tablet is the way to interact with computers?”

–Apple recruitment ad, Aug. 11, 2005

At a 2007 all-hands meeting to discuss the iPhone, Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs said the company has the “best Macs” ever in the new-product pipeline right now. The machines waiting in the wings are “off the charts,” he said. Now just what Jobs meant by that is, obviously, known only by the man himself and those whose heads would be piked on the gates at 1 Infinite Loop if they ever told.

But according to Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer, we’ll find out before the year is over. Apple is headed for a “future product transition” later this year, Oppenheimer said during the company’s quarterly conference call with investors Monday. And it will involve “state-of-the-art new products that our competitors just aren’t going to be able to match.”

With Apple’s MacBook and iPod lines both due for refreshing, it was easy to presume that these are the products to which Oppenheimer was referring. But what if they aren’t? What if he was referring to Apple’s mythical tablet PC? Consider this rumor posted to MacDailyNews:

Think MacBook screen, possibly a bit smaller, in glass with iPhone-like, but fuller-featured Multi-Touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X. This is why they bought P.A. Semi. Possibly with Immersion’s haptic tech. Slot-loading SuperDrive. Accelerometer. GPS. Pretty expensive to produce initially, but sold at “low” price that will reduce margins. Apple wants to move these babies. And move they will. This is some sick shit. App Store-compatible, able to run Mac apps, too. By October at the latest.”

Sounds plausible, doesn’t it? Certainly, given the success of the iPhone’s multi-touch platform and its speedy extension to the iPod Touch, it doesn’t take take a leap of imagination to see multi-touch making its way into a Mac tablet. Hell, it might even use the finger as a stylus. Handwriting recognition has come a long way since the Newton, and if you don’t believe that, check out the Chinese character recognition system on the iPhone.

Running with this a bit further, a finger-as-stylus touchscreen Mac tablet would make a hell of a nice counterpart to Apple’s new MobileMe service, wouldn’t it? It would make a great e-book reader too–if Apple ever gets around to adding a bookstore to iTunes. And if Apple were to link it up to iTunes U, as it undoubtedly would, the Mac tablet might even become higher education’s killer app. Especially if it arrives at market right before school starts, as it seems scheduled to do. A notebook, a textbook AND a MacBook–all in one.

Sound like “a state-of-the-art new product that our competitors just aren’t going to be able to match” to you? Does to me.

Still, Jobs has often dismissed rumors of an Apple tablet. “There are no plans to make a tablet,” Jobs said during a panel discussion at the 2003 All Things Digital conference. “It turns out people want keyboards. … We look at the tablet and we think it’s going to fail.”

Of course Jobs said Apple would never build a phone, either.

[Image Credit: FactoryJoe]

A boutique semiconductor design company, P.A. Semi specializes in super-low power PowerPC processors. It boasts a rock-star design team littered with Itanium, Opteron and UltraSparc veterans, led by Dan Dobberpuhl, who was among the lead designers on Digital Equipment’s Alpha and StrongARM chips. And in February of 2007, P.A. Semi uncrated its PWRficient 64-bit multicore processors, 2-gigahertz ARM chips that consume just 5 to 13 watts of power, making them 300% more efficient than any comparable chip.

An impressive chip. Question is, what does Apple want with the impressive little chip shop that made it? Perhaps the same thing it was looking for in 2005 when it first approached the company about a supply deal. That agreement never panned out and Apple subsequently signed up with Intel (INTC) and made transition to X86 chips. The switch has gone well. So well, that it seemed almost a foregone conclusion that Intel’s new line of Atom processors would end up in everything from the next generation iPhone to that mythical iTablet, Apple gaming console and next-gen Newton.

But perhaps that’s not the case. Perhaps Atom’s not quite to Apple’s liking? Perhaps, as word on the street has it, it failed to produce the kind of battery life that Apple wants for its ultra-portable designs. Perhaps Apple just wants its own in-house processor design team, one it could use to push its own technical innovations into the market.

Or perhaps P.A. Semi’s working on a new chip so insanely great that Apple CEO Steve Jobs felt compelled to acquire the company? More to follow when Apple reports earnings later today.

Silverthorne, part of Intel’s “Menlow” Mobile Internet Device platform, reportedly runs as fast as a second generation Pentium M processor, but consumes between half a watt and two watts of electrical power–about a tenth of the power consumed by a typical notebook processor. No wonder Apple’s said to be interested in the chip. It would appear to be perfect for a number of devices rumored to be secreted away in its product pipeline–the FlashBook, the multitouch Newton, the Mac tablet.

That said, we’ll likely not see it popping up in a 3G iPhone, though at first glance it would make sense there as well. “According to several iPhone teardowns, Apple is likely using the Samsung S3C6400, or some special equivalent built just for them, in the iPhone,” explains News.com’s Tom Krazit. “That chip is based on the ARM1176 core, which at 620MHz consumes just 279 milliwatts. That’s running all-out, whereas most of the time you’re actually going to be drawing much less power than that. Silverthorne, by contrast, will consume 500 milliwatts of power at minimum, and probably only when it’s doing nothing in idle mode. Those numbers just aren’t going to work in a phone, especially an Apple phone, if the company really is so concerned about power consumption that it has held off on releasing a 3G iPhone until the power consumption of that modem improves.”

Surely a coincidence. But no doubt an uncomfortable one for Apple. Perish the thought of Jobs pitching a defeaturing of the iPhone during his Macworld keynote. … “We’ve designed something truly wonderful …. Aural Voicemail. Boom?” Best to sweep this one from the decks before January, yeah?

Anyway, Klausner–a patent holding outfit founded by Judah Klausner, who claims to have invented the PDA and electronic organizer–alleges the iPhone’s Visual Voicemail feature violates two of its patents (U.S. Patents 5,572,576 and 5,283,818) and demands $360 million in damages and future royalties. Sadly for Apple it may well get them. Klausner has won two previous infringement lawsuits over the same patents, wringing settlement agreements out of AOL and Vonage both in the past year.

And Apple once licensed some of the intellectual property at issue here for use in the Newton. Apple’s accountants are probably already working out the math on this one. As are AT&T, Comcast and eBay, which were all slapped with similar suits.

“Like iPhone and the iPod Touch, the new device runs an embedded version of Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard operating system,” Apple Insider reports. “Externally, the multi-touch PDA has been described by sources as an ultra-thin ’slate’ akin to the iPhone, about 1.5 times the size and sporting an approximate 720×480 high-resolution display that comprises almost the entire surface of the unit. The device is further believed to leverage multi-touch concepts which have yet to gain widespread adoption in Apple’s existing multi-touch products–the iPhone and iPod touch–like drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste.”

Sounds like a slick device–assuming it’s not vaporware. But really, you think Apple has time for such distractions when it’s doing all that it can to get the Tablet Mac ready for Macworld?

Once you actually use this magical display there’s no going back. We actually think we have a better keyboard. It takes a few days of getting used to, but I bet you dinner that after a few days of using it you’ll be convinced. It takes a week–you have to learn how to trust it. When you learn how to trust it, you’ll fly. And we can use that physical space for other things where you don’t need a keyboard–we can add new applications… it provides incredible flexibility, and you don’t take up half the space of this thing with a physical keyboard.”

–Apple CEO Steve Jobs, All Things Digital 5

At our All Things Digital conference last month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs claimed that no one on Apple’s design team questioned the forthcoming iPhone’s lack of a physical keyboard. Of course, the team members have presumably spent enough time with the device to feel comfortable with it. Not so the New York Times, which has dubbed the onscreen keyboard Apple’s “billion-dollar gamble,” apparently without even using it.

And to be sure, it may be just that. Text entry on portable devices has always been a thorny matter. Apple knows this all too well, having watched in horror as its Newton MessagePad became a commercial failure, mercilessly tarred and feathered for its handwriting recognition problems.

Is the company setting itself up for another such scenario with the iPhone’s keyboard? “The tactile feedback of a mechanical keyboard is a pretty important aspect of human interaction,” Bill Moggridge, a founder of industrial design outfit Ideo, told the Times. “If you take that away you tend to be very insecure.”

I suppose. But isn’t it possible that Apple’s implementation of the iPhone’s onscreen keyboard might be well-done enough to allay those anxieties? Early impressions from some folks who’ve actually played with the device suggest this may be the case. “I think the iPhone’s virtual keyboard is a huge improvement over the mechanical thumbpads found on the Treo and any other smart phones of its size,” Chicago Sun Times columnist Andy Ihnatko wrote in January after spending 45 minutes with the device. “The buttons are significantly larger, you don’t have to hit them dead-center, you lightly tap them instead of punching them down, and the software is smart enough to know that you meant to type ‘Tuesday’ instead of ‘Tudsday.’ After 30 seconds, I was already typing faster with the iPhone than I ever have with any other phone. I suspect that true email demons will need to adapt to the lack of tactile feedback, though.”