Will Apple’s tablet announced next week be called the iPad?

Up until now most people have been speculating the iSlate or iTablet – the iSlate since Apple registered this name a few years back as a trademark and also registered the islate.com and islate.co.uk domain names through an intermediary back in 2006. The interesting thing is while most articles have been talking about the iSlate or iTablet, last week there was an article on the local Sacramento TV news about the upcoming device and they kept referring to it as the iPad – strange I thought, since no-one else was refering to it by that name.

Well, this morning, this article claims the latest rumor is that the device will be the iPad, since Apple registered this name through a dummy company owned by Apple most recently in July 2009. Doing a few more searches, there was a Borders book survey back in August 2009 where one of the questions asked if they were planning on buying an ‘Apple iPad’ – maybe at the time with was just a typo?

So there you have it. Could it be that the tablet device to be announced next week is the iPad?

Much to Microsoft’s annoyance Linux is appearing in consumer electronics everywhere

I find it interesting to read about where Linux is showing up nowdays and think its interesting how many consumer electronics gadgets are running Linux without their users even knowing about it. If you compare to how Microsoft likes to plaster labels on everything that is “Windows XP|Vista|7 ready”, many consumer electronics are running Linux without users knowing.

I’m sure this list is only scratching the surface, but here’s a few examples of devices running Linux:

  • Tivo – we’ve had our Tivo series 1 box for something like 8 years now – it’s running constantly everyday and I can’t think of any problems we’ve ever had with it, other than hardware related when the cooling fan broke and it turned off because it overheated. Easily fixed. Other than that it’s running 24/7. Can’t imagine anything running Windows being as stable as that, and not even coming anywhere close.
  • Most Sony TVs since about 2003 (see here)
  • Palm Pre & Pixi
  • Google Android based phones
  • Many routers and WiFi hubs (eg Linksys)
  • Amazon Kindle