The speculation about a possible tablet computer from Apple has come thick and fierce all over again. The latest rumblings have it once again that Steve Jobs continues to shepherd the project through various obstacles, such as finalizing an actual design.

Indeed, if you can believe those rumors, this gadget has gone through several major alterations, such as switching from Mac OS X to the iPhone OS, not to mention various screen sizes. If true, the alleged iTablet would be capable of running existing iPhone apps, including that huge quantity of games. Of course how they’d scale up to a larger screen is anyone’s guess, although great graphical display is a normal part of the various OS X versions.

Now nobody outside of Apple knows for sure whether such a product will truly see the light of day, despite the optimistic nature of some of those reports. The return to Apple of Michael Tchao, someone originally involved with the Newton, does make the entire concept seem sensible, though. In the end, maybe the stories are based on fact, and that some iteration of this gadget will appear. The real question, however, is what purpose it might serve.

This is no small issue, and it’s one I’ve raised before. You see, Apple really doesn’t want to build a niche product, even though some of the critics apply that label to the Macintosh. They aren’t going to invest boatloads of development money in something that doesn’t see a solid return now and in the future. There has to be a long-term goal in mind, and not just some quick profits today. In that sense, Apple is very different from just about all the other PC makers on the planet.

I rather suspect the netbook came about not because it was a neat idea, but a way for companies to build a cheap product and sell something, anything, in a down economy. In the end, it doesn’t matter one bit if those customers eventually return to standard PC note-books when they can afford the price of admission. Whatever sells is good.

Apple doesn’t operate that way, which is why they weren’t first on the market with a digital media player or a smartphone. They waited to develop something they had faith in, something that would survive for a number of years. Even as iPod sales dip, more buyers are moving to the iPhone, which is, of course, part iPod. So Apple is only cannibalizing itself, which is just fine from their point of view.

With an iTablet, we have to look at the purposes it serves. Certainly an enhanced gaming platform is a given, considering Apple’s rapidly growing success in that market. I would also suspect that this device would allow you to connect external input devices, such as game controllers, to greatly enhance the experience, and perhaps encourage developers to provide more of the features you find in a traditional gaming console. Certainly a high definition TV port, such as the new Mini DisplayPort, would be a huge plus.

The latest online chatter has it that Apple is also courting newspaper and magazine publishers to bring their publications to the tablet platform. You can certainly see where Apple might even be developing enhanced text display features, designed to make the Amazon Kindle DX even more pathetic than it is now. If this caught on, it would, in small part, help salvage the publishing industry that’s seen incredible losses in sales and profits in recent years.

However, I don’t think buyers would be lining up to acquire a $700 or $800 e-book reader. That’s just an additional and surely highly useful function.

Surely businesses that find an iPhone’s screen too small could find lots of purposes for an Apple tablet. Physicians would use them to record patient information, as they do now with PC tablet-based note-books. Quality control people could tour a production floor with iTablet in hand to check inventory levels and deal with manufacturing issues. Courtroom reporters could use it to record both the audio and text of a legal proceeding, and anyone wanting a portable device with touch entry would be a potential customer.

Graphic artists might find a larger touch screen presents a valuable new technique with which to generate and edit digital artwork, and the iTablet’s text entry features would be far more capable than that on the iPhone. You might even be able to write something containing more than a few paragraphs without hitting the wall in terms of flexibility.

Naturally, lots of people who might have purchased a Mac note-book might consider the iTablet instead. But a sale is a sale, and that shouldn’t harm Apple’s bottom line. Even better would be to attract people from the Dark Side, some of whom are using an old-fashioned stylus to interface with an existing PC tablet.

In case you’re wondering, I’m not at all certain whether I want a grown-up iPhone or iPod touch, however it’s labeled. I’m old fashioned enough to prefer the traditional note-book and, for that matter, desktop. On the other hand, maybe a few hours exposure to an iTablet will make me change my tune.

That is, of course, should such a device actually appear. Despite what you’ve read, that is by no means certain.

All right, this won’t really impact readers outside of Europe in any meaningful way, but it should. In response to a European Union edict to offer Windows users a choice of browsers, Microsoft has devised a ballot box scheme to allow you to make your selection.

Did I say scheme?

Well, if you can believe the critics, a widely-published representation of a proposed Microsoft solution stacks the deck sufficiently to scare people off choosing something other than Internet Explorer 8. So they may be following the letter of the law, but the spirit is something else again.

How so?

Well, the screen shot I’ve seen puts the ballot box in an Internet Explorer 8 browser window. If that’s the case, Microsoft is already cheating by preloading new PCs with its own browser. That’s bad enough, but evidently clicking on a browser choice takes you through several windows and a bunch of frightening warning messages before you can download and install the browser you want. If that’s the case, you can see where a fair number of Windows users would just decide that the cure is worse than the disease and stick with the pathetic browser they already have.

Sure, this proposal is not yet final, and I will grant that the complicated selection methodology may be the result of the fact that Microsoft really hasn’t a clue about designing simple user interfaces. Something that shouldn’t require more than two or three steps thus requires twice as many, and a simple user agreement ought to cover the essentials about installing a different browser. But no doubt Microsoft’s lawyers are also well versed in making the simple complex.

Let’s be fair about this. I doubt that the European Union’s technical people would be foolish enough to allow Microsoft to get away with this misbegotten strategy. Consider when the EU demanded that Microsoft provide documentation on interoperability of their server software for third parties. After taking months and months to complete an initial draft, the people assigned to review the material pronounced it incomprehensible. So either Microsoft was unable to explain to anyone in clear, concise language how to use their products, or they decided that it was better to just confuse people, so maybe they’d give up trying to use a competitor’s app.

Or maybe Microsoft builds products first, and then goes back and tries to figure out what they did and how the end user can actually make them function.

In the end, there will probably be a simpler solution for this ballot box, one that doesn’t confuse and befuddle customers. What I wonder is why this isn’t being done in other countries, because it’s really a sensible answer to giving Windows users a choice, other than just switching to a Mac of course.

Unfortunately, Microsoft won’t do such a thing voluntarily. Instead, it would require action from the U.S. antitrust people and similar regulatory authorities around the world. It is highly unlikely that’s going to happen anytime soon, or ever. At the same time, more and more Windows users are deserting the insecure environment of Internet Explorer in favor of Firefox, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome and other alternatives. Sure Microsoft’s unstable CEO, Steve Ballmer, might regard the market share of some of these apps as “rounding errors,” but as more and more people decide to give Internet Explorer the heave ho, maybe they’ll get the message and realize that there is actually a great solution for this dilemma.

Early on, in addition to Microsoft’s well-known anticompetitive practices, they actually made Internet Explorer superior to Netscape on both the Mac and Windows platforms. Do you remember when Netscape become a slow, bloated mess and MSIE was a leaner, meaner alternative? Yes, I’m serious.

Today, despite the competition and a rapidly dwindling market share, Internet Explorer has been shown to be inferior to all of the competitors in nearly every respect. It’s slower, less stable, and renders complicated standards-based Web sites less accurately. Despite having tremendous resources to build superior products, Microsoft has shown over and over again that they just can’t make it happen. Why?

Are we to conclude that the tens of thousands of developers at Microsoft just don’t have the talent to do a credible job and that the far smaller staffs at Apple, Mozilla and Opera have all the chops? It’s easy to call the world’s largest software company incompetent, but I think the problem is more complicated. I’ve little doubt that, with proper leadership, MSIE’s developers could also create a super-fast browser that meets all the prevailing Web standards. What’s more, I think they could get the job done in probably no more than a year, if they were given the proper direction to embark on such a product.

Alas, the bigwigs at Microsoft, from the inhabitants of executive suite to the various department heads, don’t seem to have a clue how to make something better. Yes, I realize that the Zune HD is getting pretty positive reviews, and maybe Microsoft has found its way with their newest media player, although they’re two years late. But that is the exception that proves the rule.

When it comes to browsers, there’s still time for Microsoft to deliver a competitive and even a superior product, and make it run on the Mac and Linux too. But Steve Ballmer and his minions may be master salespeople, but they are otherwise utterly incompetent.

I’m quite sure that the news that downloads from the App Store have exceeded the two billion mark a little over 14 months after opening day did not come as a surprise to most Mac users. Nor should it come as a surprise that there are 85,000 apps available, and thousands more are going up every single week.

Certainly, Apple helped make it easier to navigate through this incredible repository with improved search and “Genius” recommendations in iPhone 3.1. With over 50 million potential customers, you can bet that tons of developers are wishing and hoping for big paydays.

Obviously Apple’s competitors are struggling to spin the news in their favor without much success. Microsoft, for example, claims that developers can’t profit from their products on the App Store, since so many are available for very cheap prices — or free for that matter. What the Microsoft drone fails to comprehend is the fact that the developers set their own prices, and they clearly feel that selling 10,000 copies at 99 cents each is better than selling 1,000 copies at $4.99. It’s the basic math that eludes Microsoft.

Indeed, Microsoft’s efforts to duplicate Apple’s success include dinging developers $100 for every single app submitted, regardless of whether it’s approved. Indeed, if Microsoft asks for a change, the developer cannot submit the new version without paying the fee. Talk of gouging in the first degree. How does that encourage them to jump ship or add support for a new mobile platform if they have to face extra upfront costs? Does Microsoft truly believe the fiction that they will somehow match or exceed Apple’s success in 14 months, or even 14 years?

Now you have to understand that the competition is certainly going to want to toot their own horns. The growth of Apple, Research in Motion and Google’s Android platform has, combined, taken a huge bite out of Microsoft and the market share for Windows Mobile. They’re now promising to have 600 apps available for the release of the next version of their mobile operating system. Even if that projection was to be believed, and it’s hard to take anything they say seriously, the number would seem pathetic compared to what Apple is offering.

Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago that the world’s most famous irrational CEO, Steve Ballmer, was explaining how stupid it was for Apple to want to enter the saturated mobile phone space. How wrong he was, but is that anything unusual?

Palm’s response is a Web-based app system for their Pre smartphone. But let’s not forget how Apple suffered from severe criticisms over their attempts to take a similar approach with the iPhone. That went nowhere, and it no doubt helped persuade Apple to move quickly to get its iPhone SDK out and create the App Store. So how can Palm expect us to believe that they will succeed, even though they’re selling a fraction of the number of units Apple is now shipping?

Indeed the App Store has become a game changer not just for smartphone makers. The gaming industry is looking carefully too, which is one huge change as far as the Apple universe is concerned. Macs have always played a poor second fiddle to Windows when it comes to getting the latest and greatest games. Even when they are ported to the Mac, performance rarely matches the Windows version, simply because publishers won’t make the investment to optimize the app for another platform. That Apple is now using the same processors as Windows boxes helps to a large degree, but it doesn’t bridge the gap completely.

Now to the surprise of many, the iPhone and iPod touch have become serious gaming platforms. There are over 21,000 games available for these gadgets, an inventory far larger than all dedicated portable gaming devices, combined, can offer. Sure, not all of them are as full featured, but the major publishers are regularly releasing product for the App Store at a price far less than what you’d pay on those other systems.

You also have to wonder if the recent price cuts on gaming consoles are in anticipation — or the fear — that Apple might actually deliver a full-bore dedicated gaming device in the near future. Certainly there are candidates. Apple TV, for example, might be a potential contender for bundled gaming features. The rumored Apple Tablet, iTablet or iPad might suit as well, but even your iPhone and iPod touch can be connected to a regular TV to expand the gaming experience.

How this all might play out is anyone’s guess. Certainly Apple knows, and they surely have a long range vision that they expect to play out in the coming months or years. Meantime, the other companies can only watch with fearful anticipation what Apple might deliver.

Whether Apple’s gaming strategy continues to play out strictly in the tiny portable computer arena, or expands to Apple TV and perhaps a tablet computer, doesn’t matter. In each case, being able to play games will only be one of the available functions. So you will want to buy them for other reasons even if games aren’t in the picture. At the same time, if Apple can trump the game console makers with that approach, it’ll be yet another area where they will reign supreme. Microsoft’s worst fears may come true after all.

For the second time in recent days, I want to tip my virtual hat to liberal talk show host Ed Schultz for coining the phrase “psycho talk” on his TV show. Schultz applies that label to political figures and talk show hosts that inhabit the other side of the political spectrum and make what he regards as wacky statements. I’m going to apply it to people who write about the Mac with less than a full deck.

Recently, one tech pundit, who shall remain unnamed, wrote an article going on at length about why every personal computer user should consider upgrading to Windows 7. Although Microsoft’s successor to the failed Windows Vista is primarily a refresh with some interface refinements, the writer in question seems to regard it as a revolution in computer operating systems, and he says that Snow Leopard doesn’t come close.

Understand that Windows 7 has not as yet actually been released. Those who are writing those articles are actually using public betas, or a copy of the alleged “Released To Manufacturing” version, the one that supposedly went to the DVD pressing plants and PC makers to load onto their new computers.

Without personal experience, I’ll accept for the sake of argument that these preliminary versions of Windows 7 are close enough to the final version not to make a significant difference. That will help avoid any arguments on the subject, although we won’t know for sure until the product is actually on sale.

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