Apple COO Reveals Plans for Touch Tablet -- Kinda

It’s usually almost impossible to work out what is going on behind the curtain at Apple, but COO Tim Cook’s statement in yesterday’s quarterly earnings call offers about as clear a confirmation of a tablet-style computer as we are likely to get.

Quizzed again about an Apple netbook, Cook did the usual Apple thing and panned the entire category:

For us, it’s about doing great products. And when I look at what is being sold in the netbook space today, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, and just not a consumer experience… that we would put the Mac brand on, quite frankly. And so it’s not a space, as it exists today, that we’re interested in, nor do we believe that customers in the long term would be interested in.

This is nothing new. Steve Jobs called netbooks a “nascent market” and a race to the bottom. and if you’ve ever used one, you’ll know that the build quality isn’t up to the kind of standards we expect from Apple. But it was Cooks next words which intrigue:

People that want a small computer (so to speak) that does browsing and e-mail might want to buy an iPod touch or an iPhone. So we have other products to accomplish some of what people buy netbooks for. So in that way we play in an indirect basis.

That sounds to me like a giant iPhone, an impossibly thin touch-screen device which avoids the problems of a cramped keyboard by simply not having one, and combats battery life troubles by simply scaling up the iPhone, which enjoys battery life way longer that that found in a netbook.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber makes an interesting point, too. Version 3.0 of the iPhone OS has a keyboard which is “rescaled dynamically.” That sounds like it’s being readied for a bigger screen.

Apple to netbooks: Drop dead [Macworld via ★]

Photo: Andy on Flickr/Flickr