As I laid out my arguments in part 1, I believe the iPhone OS will form the backbone of the Apple Tablet. What is more is it will likely be able to run the same apps from the iPhone App store.
That does not mean the 10 inch screen will have 480x320 resolution. Rather that apps made with Interface Builder in the iPhone SDK can work with relative resolution independence. Switching from portrait to landscape mode provides the best proof for that. Most apps like games will need a higher res version but that should be a minor development problem.
The biggest paradigm of the interface will be wether Apple will allow more than one app to launch at any one time. Actually, the current problem with the approach Apple has taken with the iPhone is not that background apps are not allowed. Its the speed of app switching and
the fact that most apps do not return to the same position when relaunched. The iPhone 3GS addresses most of the first problem. The tablet hardware will likely eliminate that problem completely. However Apple and the developers need to work harder on making an App relaunch in the same state it closes.
Here is how background apps can be easily enabled. The double click home will leave the current app in the background while simultaneously going to the home screen. The running app will be represented with a blue dot. Apple may also move all apps currently running in the dock, so they are not spread out amongst different home-screens.
An alternative is to use the multi touch trackpad gestures on Macbook Pros. Swiping 4 fingers up will leave the current app running while going to the home screen. Swiping 4 fingers down may launch expose for easy app switching.
I personally think that while 3rd party background operation might be allowed in some way, Apple will never leave the management of that up to the consumer. If it did, the most popular app on the app store would be a background killing app, like its on the android app store.
It will be interesting. Since you can never hold and operate the Tablet with one hand like the iPhone the holding hand or one of its fingers might play an important role in activating certain gestures.
One thing people have missed with the iPhone is that the dock is home to the apps which Apple allows to run in the background. Maybe enabling background operation could be as simple as adding an application to the doc, if there is space that is.
The second question is what will be the default hand held position: portrait or landscape? Most people assume a tablet to be used in landscape along with a pen. There is one small problem for Apple with that approach: the virtual keyboard. The best way to type on a virtual keyboard is with two thumbs. Holding it sideways will require split keyboard or the center keys will be unreachable. The tablet is just way to wide for that. However, holding it in portrait mode might feel just right. Landscape mode might be reserved for those media rich interactions like overflow, movie or a game.
Given that both the iPhone and Apple Table will be used with fingers and feature similarly looking OS, most visual elements will likely remain the same visual size on both devices. So the Apple Tablet will not have 16 icons per home screen plus 4 in the dock but as much as 70
icons per home screen plus 7 in the dock.
Sent from my iPhone
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