There is a fever of anticipation over the imminent release of a tablet-style computer from Apple – let’s call it the iSlate [Thursday Update — actually, let’s call it the iPad — I stand by everything else in the post, though].

Nobody outside the company knows very much about how it works or its specifications, but the consensus of opinion is that it’s basically a big iPhone. Let’s imagine that’s the case, and I’ll write an apology on Thursday if this turns out to be very wrong.

It’s not just Apple that thinks that 2010 will be the year when Tablets finally come of age. Models from HP and Nokia were just two of the slew unveiled at CES a couple of weeks ago.

Now, I know that Apple UX design expertise means that their device will be poles apart from the Tablet PCs launched by these competitors or Microsoft hardware partners in the noughties, but it won’t be entirely different. The latter part of that is interesting to me, because I spent quite a lot of time with those devices, reviewing them for trade and consumer press titles. What I discovered is that they’re good at some things and less so at others.

Good for:

• Reading things – but not very long things – they still had LCD screens, so still created eye fatigue. Fine for a magazine article or a blog post, though.
• Filling in forms – the devices proved popular with people like service engineers, medical doctors and financial services salespeople.
• Drawing things – it’s easier to draw freehand using something like a pen, rather than something like a mouse or a touchpad.

Not so good for:

• Typing more than a few words – some had convertible designs whereby you could unfold a keyboard, but that made them bulkier.
• Surviving in your bag – the screen needs covering so needs a sturdy secondary case, which means it takes longer to get out and at work than a conventional laptop.

In a story today that looks not totally dissimilar from industrial espionage, a research firm called Flurry has apparently tracked the application usage coming out of Apple’s headquarters to reveal some suggestions of the use cases the company is anticipating:

The mix of apps is made up mostly of media and entertainment titles, as opposed to productivity or entertainment programs — underscoring that the tablet is aimed at consumers. [my emphasis]

“In particular, there was a strong trend toward news, books and other kinds of daily media consumption, including streaming music and radio,” stated the report. Coupled with recent reports that Apple is in talks with book and newspaper publishers, the apps suggest the tablet will compete with Amazon’s Kindle e-reading device.

Across the “tablet” apps Flurry identified, it also found a strong emphasis on social networking, photo sharing and other types of social interaction.

I hope you can see where this is going: iSlate and social media in a world where all right-thinking people are toting an iSlate. Web 2.0 is all about people creating online content: wikipedia, blogs, flickr, twitter, whatever. Slate computing devices are good for consuming content – I think it’s safe to say that a modern slate will also do video quite well. And anything that’s similar to a big iPhone will have some sort of GPS capability and the capacity for Location Based Services (LBS). They’re good for creating certain kinds of content – especially pictures, but not really for creating text content. I can imagine that up-to-140-characters will be fine, but your hand will get tired after that point.

So — in a slate-enabled future of social media expect…

More: microblogging, drawings, tagging, one-click sharing, LBS, pro media by the microchunk (iNews).

Fewer: blogs, wikipedians, lengthy comments.

This is bad in some ways, of course. Social media is already criticised for its superficiality. I cannot imagine that being able to write less will improve this image problem. On the other hand, blogging and wikipeding are already far too onerous for most people, so you could say this was simply being responsive to what people mainly want to do. Perhaps more worrying is the idea that there will be less authorship in this world and more spreading and curating. Perhaps fancifully, I like to think that the ability for anyone to self-publish is an empowering thing. I wouldn’t like to think that my ability to do so would be impeded by my choice of computer hardware.

One things I will be very interested in is the camera capabilities of the device. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine people taking a photo using a tablet, no matter who designed it, but am prepared to be corrected.

Picture: iPed Multitouch Slate by Myiube