On January 27, Apple will likely introduce a new tablet product. For the past two years, rumors have been circulating the internet about what that device might consist of. Many speculate that it will be an “enlarged iPod touch,” running a derivative of the iPhone OS. Others suspect it might be a “tablet Mac,” running a stripped down version of Mac OS X. This “middle ground” area that lives between the laptops and smartphones we use every day is a brand new market, and many companies have been working hard over the past year to define it.

When Apple entered the smartphone market with the iPhone in June 2007, it was already a fairly mature market. Four years prior, Microsoft had launched Windows Mobile 2003, a huge release that offered a full touchscreen smartphone experience with multi-tasking, robust email and music support, and syncing for music and TV shows. That same year, Palm launched the Treo 600, a remarkable device that offered an incredibly seamless solution for consuming media, email, and other content on the go. BlackBerry devices had been offering a refined mobile email experience for several years. Essentially, the iPhone entered a market that was already defined, and brought new levels of media consumption and refinement to the table, while lacking real applications, games, copy and paste, multi-tasking, and MMS (features that have all been added besides multitasking, which is expected to arrive with iPhone OS 4.0). (continue reading…)