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Apple tablet: The consumer wants one

I recently wrote about how I'm excited to see what Apple will unveil this week. At the time I thought it was merely the technologists and early adopters who were eagerly anticipating the arrival of the Apple tablet.
Written by Joel Evans, Contributor

I recently wrote about how I'm excited to see what Apple will unveil this week. At the time I thought it was merely the technologists and early adopters who were eagerly anticipating the arrival of the Apple tablet. However, I have since learned that the average consumer wants one, too.

To be clear, I've been doing an informal survey of consumers, including friends and random people that know me as an early adopter. According to my survey, people want the Tablet because it will do everything. This goes along with what also gets me excited about the soon to be released Kindle Development Kit, since the kit will allow the Kindle to be a lot more than an ebook reader.

Building on the point that the Apple tablet will do everything, the consumers I spoke with were excited about reading websites, playing games, sending and receiving e-mails, watching TV, and whatever else Apple offers up as an option on the Apple tablet. And if the report posted by Flurry is to be believed, this new Apple tablet will definitely play games, and is being tested with more than 150 of them.

The results of my informal survey seem to go against my earlier thought that consumers wouldn't want to add another piece of technology into their lives. Instead, it seems that they are ready to embrace this new technology as long as it does everything they can think of.

From the early days of the Palm and Pocket PC devices, one complaint I heard time and again was that the form factor was just too small for extended use. This was either because your eyes would be fatigued after a certain amount of time or that a certain age group would have trouble both reading the screen and manipulating the tiny stylus. Now we have manufacturers working hard to bring a tablet into everyone's hands, and they're finally the size that everyone can enjoy.

As with most technology, the concept of the tablet is nothing new, but with consumers now using their phones for just about anything you can think of, the time is finally right for a device like the tablet to enter into everyone's home.

I'm really hoping that Apple unveils the Apple tablet on Wednesday. Since we haven't seen it surface on the FCC website, one can assume that it won't be available in a week, but we could see it available in a few months time. I'll probably be one of the first to order, but I'm more interested in seeing how the tablet integrates into people's lives. After all, regardless of whether or not Apple releases a tablet, we know that manufacturers plan to get one in everyone's hands by year end, if not sooner.

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