iPod to iPad: what do Steve Jobs and Apple have up their sleeves this autumn?

Not since the feverish few days before the iPhone's debut has the Apple rumour mill turned so urgently. If you believe the hype, the chatter and the speculation, September 9 is T-Day, the day Apple announces its long-awaited, but never confirmed, tablet computer.

According to some, it's a revolutionary product, a device with the power to bring the world to your handbag or manbag and change the shape of portable computing. According to others, it's a disaster - "a train wreck from start to finish" in the words of one well-known pundit.

And yet there's very little evidence to suggest the device even exists. Characteristically, Apple remains silent.

Rumours of a touch-screen Mac can be traced back as far as 2002. Touch-screen tablet PCs (like one half of a laptop - the screen half) were on sale then, but won little fanfare. Niche objects, expensive but hardly more exciting than stylus-operated digital clipboards, they served the medical profession and other industries that worked standing up, but failed to interest either the general consumer or Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

People have been speculating on the speculation about an imaginary productBut the 2007 launch of the iPhone, with its slick touch-screen operating system and giant eco-system of third-party software, changed all that. If Apple made the iPhone just a little bigger, the thinking went, you wouldn't need to carry your laptop computer. If enough commentators speculated that Apple might make a bigger iPhone, perhaps Jobs would get the message.

Finally, after enough people speculated on the subject of the speculation, we've arrived where we are today: arguing about such details as price points, feature sets and shipping dates of an, as yet, entirely imaginary product.
         
So, let's speculate. Is Apple about to launch a mini-tablet computer?

It's possible. There's certainly a market for a "cheap" Mac. In the last couple of years, netbooks (cheaper, smaller, lower-powered laptop computers) have outsold the rest of the market, and there's a netbook-sized gap in the current Apple line-up.
 
The iPhone and iPod touch have convinced the sceptical that touch-screen technology can work properly, and that consumers want to consume media ­ film, music, photographs, games, the Internet ­ on the move.

Apple's Safari browser is superior to the competition. Apple's means of distributing music, TV and film dominates the market. So why not add books to the iTunes store, too, and compete head on with Amazon, whose Kindle ­ a kind of iPod for books ­ has proved popular in America?

According to industry commentators, a Taiwanese manufacturer has received a substantial order for 10-inch touch-screens from Apple - possibly expanding the iPhone to a more useful size for reading digital books and watching films.

Where ­ however ­ would an Apple tablet, an iPad if you will, leave the iPhone? Connectivity is key to portable computing. Some rumours suggest the new device will have 3G connectivity built in ­ making it, essentially, another mobile phone ­ and there's been talk of Apple negotiating a deal with US mobile network Verizon.

But will people want to pay a second monthly mobile phone tariff for a second Apple device? In fact, will they want to carry a second, larger, heavier Apple device, at all? Wasn't convergence at the heart of the iPhone's success - the iPod, mobile phone, PDA, web browser, camera, satnav and mini-TV all-in-one?

If the new device can make calls, will it be anything more revolutionary than a big iPhone? And if it can't make calls, then it probably should.

Anything except a full-on second coming from Steve Jobs will seem like a let downIf an iPad isn't to be a retrograde step, it will have to offer some serious computing, too (especially if it's to compete in the netbook market). It's hard to imagine touch-typing ­ where feedback is everything ­ on a glass screen. And Steve Jobs has been pretty clear, in the past, that offering cut-price computing doesn't appeal. "We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk," he said last October. It's an unlikely ad slogan.

What seems likely is that there will be an early September Apple event; after all, there almost always is. The iPod lines will get a refresh in time for the new college year and Christmas; iTunes might earn a few extra features.

The danger for Apple is that the giant vacuum created by their own characteristic secrecy and silence has been filled so completely that anything less than an all-singing, all-dancing product launch delivered personally by a post-liver transplant Steve Jobs ­ - a full-on second coming ­ - is going to feel like a giant let-down, and will be reflected in the company's share price.

If Apple has anything to deny, they should break their silence and deny it - either officially or through "the usual channels" now. Otherwise, roll on September 9 and the newest iconic gadget to wear the Apple badge. ·