The Apple Tablet has been something of a holy grail for gadget fiends. Now print publishers are enlisting in the cause with just as much fervor. Condé Nast's plan, as described by company execs to Peter Kafka of All Things D: Port Wired to Apple's tablet by mid-2010, followed later by all 17 other titles. By using a special digital format now under development by Adobe — which makes the publishing software that Condé and most other magazine publishers use — Condé also hopes to gain compatibility with tablet and other touch-screen devices made by Hewlett Packard and others.

Jobs should be flattered that such a high-profile publisher is chomping at the bit to get onto his new gizmo. Condé joins New York Times editor Bill Keller in talking up Apple's device; News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch is another recent print-media convert to the tablet religion.

Condé, clearly eager, should keep its enthusiasm in check. The company has closed six magazines and slashed budgets 25 percent at its remaining titles this year, setting off a wave of layoffs. It's doubtful that even Steve Jobs can come up with a silver bullet to rescue businesses that have spent many years squandering past digital opportunities. Especially if the company rushes too quickly and turns out a slapdash tablet product that burns its readers on the format forever.

(Photo illustration by Photo Giddy on Flickr)

TechCrunch is running pictures of Apple's c. 1990 prototablet today. Not much more than an inch thick, supposedly, the device was a portable Mac that responded to stylus input. The design was ahead of its time: judging from the photo above, it might actually pass for an Amazon Kindle 19 years later. But then-CEO John Sculley killed the deal so the company could focus on the doomed Newton PDA. Short-sighted? Hardly; here's what resurrected Apple messiah/CEO Steve Jobs himself said about tablets in 2003:

We look at the tablet and we think it is going to fail.... Tablets appeal to rich guys with plenty of other PCs and devices already. And people accuse us of niche markets.

Tablets: They suck and are useless until the day Apple says they don't anymore.

Just witness the position Apple is in with the New York Times. After we pointed out that Times editor had casually mentioned "the impending Apple slate" at an off-the-record confab, the newspaper's editor clammed up. When Peter Kafka of All Things D Keller asked him to elaborate, he got a stern quote via PR: "I ain't sayin'" anything about Apple's rumored device. But the horse was already out of the barn. One can only imagine what sort of conversation Keller might have had with Apple's famously caustic CEO Steve Jobs after that slip.

It's a clash of cultures: Keller specializes in publishing information as quickly as possible; Jobs in keeping in secret, for long stretches of time. It's also an unavoidable situation for Apple. To get beautiful content to show off the capabilities of the tablet and its (presumed) sharp color display, Apple has been meeting with magazines, newspapers and book publishers, who have lots of glossy, high-resolution content. There's no way Apple executives would talking to these guys about a forthcoming device if it didn't feel they absolutely had to.

It must be a painful situation for Apple. At least the company has lots of practice in manipulating the media. Just not usually from such an uncomfortably close distance.

We've included only e-readers (and one tablet computer) that are either developed by old media companies or have gone out of their way to partner with them; think of this as a compilation of would-be media saviors dressed up as gadgets.

Maker: Barnes & Noble (the retailer)
Name: E-Reader
Old media tie-ins: Books from Barnes & Noble (the publisher); access to books scanned by Google Books; a B&N e-book store. (More)

Maker: Apple
Name: Apple Tablet (unofficial)
Caveat: A tablet computer is much more capable than an e-reader, usually offering the resolution, sound and video capabilities of a laptop computer along with a full-color display.
Old media tie-ins: Apple is in content talks with the New York Times, a large magazine group and at least two textbook companies, sources told our colleagues at Gizmodo. (More)

Maker:Sony
Names:Reader Touch, Reader Pocket
Old media tie-ins: Sony has a great feature that will let you check out e-books from one the oldest distribution mediums out there: your local library. Publishers can't be thrilled with "Library Finder," to say nothing of Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Oh well!

Maker: Plastic Logic Ltd.
Name: Plastic Logic Reader
Old media tie-ins: Content deals with Gannett Co.'s USA Today and Pearson PLC's Financial Times. Digital bookstore from Barnes & Noble.

Maker: Amazon.com
Name: Kindle DX, Kindle 2
Old media tie-ins: e-Books — from fiction to textbooks — sold by Amazon; a variety of newspapers, including the New York Times; a variety of magazines, including Time. Non-participating newspapers, including those owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., have complained about the paltry 30 percent cut of revenues they were offered for sales on the device.

Maker: iRex
Name: DR800SG (catchy!)
Old media tie-ins: Books from Barnes & Noble's e-book store. B&N gets around.

And, bringing up the rear, there are the media companies whose devices are, for now, mostly talk.

Maker: Hearst Corp. and FirstPaper LLC
Name: Unknown
Old media tie-ins: Would presumably include content from Hearst newspapers like the Chronicle-s in San Francisco and Houston and from magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan. There has been talk of a hardware device developed by Hearst and, more recently, of an open software platform developed with FirstPaper.

Maker: Time Inc.
Name: Unknown
Old media tie-ins: There are conflicting accounts over whether Time Inc. is interested in making this device. Former Valleywag Owen Thomas of NBC Bay Area obtained a June 2009 presentation indicating plans to finish a prototype this year; Peter Kafka's sources at All Things D said the magazine division of Time Warner is interested in creating a virtual store rather than a physical device. Either way, the company is said to be seeking partnerships with other magazine publishers — Condé Nast, Meredith and Hearst, according to the documents reviewed by Thomas.

(UPDATE: Added Sony Reader due to Library Finder feature.)

(Pics via Gizmodo unless otherwise noted)

Realizing that they've lost their edge as the world's great evil empire, Disney has called on Apple overlord Jobs, who joined the board back in 2006, to help them steer a new path toward consumerist greatness. And, to that end, Jobs gave Disney access to his Apple Store blueprints and encouraged engineers to "think bigger," which means stores are no longer retail centers, but "Imagination Centers" that bubble with "Pixar-esque winks and nods."

Yes, gone are the days of plush toy displays and in are the days of video clips on demand, fake trees that sing happy birthday and, while they're at it, olfactory experimentation:

There will be a scent component; if a clip from Disney's coming "A Christmas Carol" is playing in the theater, the whole store might suddenly be made to smell like a Christmas tree.

Wow! This all sounds totally necessary!

Taken with Disney's plans for a brand-centric Comic-Con, it seems the company's poised to recreate the broken world in its own nightmarish image. And, in a move that would finally validate all those "Disneyfication" critiques of New York, Disney may open a new flagship store in Times Square. Sigh.

As our colleague Brian Lam at Gizmodo has reported, Apple — and presumably CEO Jobs — is trying to woo magazine, newspaper and texbook publishers to provide content for Apple's forthcoming tablet device, rumored to resemble an overgrown iPhone. It must have been humbling for magazine publishers, a notoriously egotistical bunch, to be summoned to Apple's Cupertino campus to submit their vision of the future to Jobs, as Lam reported.

So it's not entirely surprising that a backlash is said to be forming. Here's how one newspaper executive described Jobs and his previous iTunes Store deals, in Ad Age: "People put their hands out and let him put the handcuffs on them... The same thing now is happening with the publishing industry. They are afraid to do anything, to say anything. At the same time, they're saying, 'Let's see what other options we have.'"

The dissident publishers are talking about putting their own storefront app on the tablet, selling content from all the different publishing companies, according to Ad Age. That way, their thinking goes, the content doesn't become a "commodity" eclipsed by the device, as happened with Apple's music store and iPod.

Never mind that the iTunes Store has provided the only significant source of digital revenue for the struggling record labels, and became the largest single music retailer in the U.S. this year, according to an NPD estimate, moving 25 percent of units and turning about 70 percent of the gross proceeds over to content creators.

It's entirely likely print publishers will be able to create their own Apple tablet storefront if that's what they decide to do. After all, Apple recently enabled the selling of content within iPhone Apps, and there's no reason to think the situation wouldn't be the same on an iPhone-like tablet, particularly with Apple under government scrutiny about apps it vetoes.

But withholding print content from Apple's own store would be like the self-destructive act of a petulant, confused teenager. Consumers are already running searchers within the iTunes Store for music, movies, TV shows, e-books, audio books and other media; if newspaper and magazine publishers are in the mix, they get the chance to sell related content in the search results. Assuming a reasonable revenue split can be reached, why wouldn't publishers want to be where the media consumers already are? It's not like they've been irrationally lashing out at the internet lately. (Ahem.)

"DVD" Jon Lohansen has been tweaking Apple for years. After breaking the encryption on DVDs, he went on to unscramble Apple's music store files, then its wi-fi media streaming, then virtual locks within the iPhone. Now he's got his own company, doubleTwist, whose mission is to connect non-Apple devices to your iTunes library — the same sort of trick the Apple-baiters over at Palm recently tried and then apparently gave up on.

This ad, which inverts an iconic Macintosh ad by putting Jobs in the role of Big Brother, is sure to get plenty of publicity, just like the Apple store trick. Free press is, of course, far preferable to paid advertising. Any old hacker could figure that out; it takes a more clever one to actually pull it off.

Apple's innovation over previous head mounted displays is, in part, to separate the laser engine from the headgear, stowing the engine in a separate unit connected to the frames via fiber optic cable. Such an "iGlasses" setup, as our tipster calls it, would allow a more immersive television, gaming or conferencing experience when using, say, an iPhone. Or you could just walk around pretending to be a commando from the future, with frickin' laser breams attached to your head.

It's not clear whether Jobs will ever turn this officially-designated innovation into a product; his company boasts an impressive cash hoard with which it funds more research than it can use. Many of the patents from Apple's seemingly endless stream are never heard from again. The obsessive CEO remains, by all accounts, infatuated with his forthcoming tablet product at the moment, so we're not counting on being able to buy iGlasses anytime soon. But simply by putting the patent into the trophy case, Apple adds a little something to its mystique among its growing base of fans, the press included.

The first page of the patent is below, along with one drawing; we've archived the full filing here. AppleInsider summarized the application back in April.

We downloaded the app after it was flagged on the personal blog of Jennifer 8. Lee, the Chinese American New York Times reporter who wrote a book on the evolution of the fortune cookie. In a post titled "Now You Can Get Fortune Cookies on Your iPhone with a Ching Chong voice," Lee writes that the voice in the app "definitely doesn't sound like a native Chinese speaker, just what someone who thinks a native Chinese speaker would sound like in English... Yikes."

Yikes indeed. In addition to the ridiculous voice (see our brief video above), there's also the sound of a gong, and a brief string refrain that's become the calling card of all-too-many caricatured "Chinese" moments in film and television. We've emailed app author Charles Hill to get his thoughts, and will update this post if we do. For now this app looks pretty unredeemable. Of course judging by the popularity of stupid "ching-chong" poses among Olympic athletes and teen celebrities, the app should still enjoy some decent sales until Apple yanks it.

The drawn-out confusion about why Apple rejected the Google Voice telephony application from its iPhone App Store has been agonizing to anyone who has followed it. Apple sources spread the rumor the call-forwarding system was rejected due to objections from Apple partner AT&T. This proved completely false, Apple was the one with issues. Apple then insisted, in a public letter to the FCC, "Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it." The letter went out July 31, at least a full month after Jobs resumed his CEO duties.

Google has now made public its own FCC response. And, go figure, it offers specific details on how Apple did, in fact reject, Google Voice, directly and repeatedly. Apple marketing honcho Phil Schiller delivered the news, according to Google (click any image to enlarge):

Here are the reasons Apple gave:

Apple, we predict, will try and explain this contradiction away as a miscommunication, either between Schiller and Google or between Schiller and the Apple team that prepared the response to the FCC. That puts a lot of heat on Schiller, but it wouldn't be the first time Jobs has allowed one of his underlings to take the fall for misleading outsiders.

UPDATE: Now Apple says it's Google that's not telling the truth. John Paczkowski of All Things D quotes an Apple spokeswoman saying "Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google." Fun!

On the bright side, regardless of what Apple has told Google in the past — now subject of a "he said/she said" dispute — Apple does seem to be sticking by the idea that it could at some point approve Google Voice. And for Google Voice users that's at least a nice thought.

Those sites are claiming that there's enough space to fit an iPod nano camera in the iPod touch 3rd generation. This is their evidence:

That's ok. However, if you look at the guts of the iPod touch 2nd generation, you will find there's probably plenty of space to fit a nano camera too:

So Apple may be able to fit the iPod nano camera in the iPod touch third generation and the second generation. So?

The question is: Why the hell should they do that? Why should Apple include the lame 640 x 480 webcam of the nano—a camera that Apple doesn't allow to do still photos because they would look like crap—in a high end product like the iPod touch? Wouldn't people expect the same quality as the camera in the iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS?

Like I already said in this analysis of the potential reasons, if there's no iPod nano camera inside the iPod touch, it is probably because the nano webcam sucks. Plain and simple. It just doesn't match the feature mix of the touch, and the standard set by the iPhone.

So no, I'm afraid there is no need to find mysterious conspiracies in this one, neither to justify failed rumormongering. In this case, Jobs points out perfectly valid reasons for the exclusion of the camera in the third generation touch, even if that fact sucks. It's a marketing decision on their part, not a technical one. He is not lying this time. You can crucify him for that, if you want. We already did.

I'm sure that, in time, they would include a camera in one of upgrade cycles, when they actually need it. But you can be sure that it will be a decent camera, and not the nano's. [iFixIt's iPod touch 2nd generation and 3rd generation teardown]

Hoodwinking the press is an old tradition for Jobs, and reporters were immediately suspicious when Jobs told Times columnist David Pogue he decided to omit a much-anticipated camera from the iPod Touch in order to keep the cost down. Jobs said "we were focused on... reducing the price to $199. We don't need to add new stuff." But an Apple rumor site then heard that the camera was delayed because it was too buggy, leading Fortune to ask if Jobs had been lying.

Now comes tangible evidence he probably was: Hardware website iFixIt took apart the new iPod Touch Jobs was talking about, only to discover a conspicuous gap at the top of the device just large enough for the camera Apple is using on its other new iPod, the Nano:

It took months for the facts to catch up with Jobs' misleading spin about his health; in this case, the turnaround has been reduced to just five days. If Jobs has no moral qualms about dissembling in the press, this acceleration should at least instill some practical concern.

We're guessing that whoever arranged to place an ad for Halloween skeletons next to a picture of Apple's famously a gaunt CEO (click above image to enlarge) is already fired, or perhaps just severely spanked. Still, good luck getting Jobs to return to speak at your next lucrative D conference, Journal guys! (Maybe if you promise him it won't be a bare-bones affair...)

Hat-tip to iPhone Savior, which first posted this. PDF via WSJ.com.

After spotting some stray tweets about the incident, Todd Bishop of TechFlash dug up the tale: At yesterday's annual Microsoft meeting at Safeco Field, Ballmer was making his entrance when a 'Softie tried to snap his picture with an iPhone. Bad idea!

Ballmer grabbed the Apple device from the employee and made some funny remarks as everyone booed. Then he put it on the ground and pretended to stomp on it, before walking away... during his presentation on stage, Ballmer referred to the episode again, teasing the person and making it clear that he hadn't forgotten what happened.

Ballmer, at heart a sales guy, perhaps does not cultivate the degree of self-awareness necessary to see the parallels between his relentless — if, in this case, somewhat lighthearted — demonization of his competitors within Microsoft and the tactics of Big Brother from 1984. He is, in short, acting like the very guy Apple has chosen as its ideal foil. But if his Two Minutes Hate at Safeco Field was a clumsy PR move, it was hardly out of character; in fact, as the viral mash-up above shows, there is something about large company functions that seems accentuate the man's insanity.

His employees, at least, are sympathetic...

...sometimes to a fault!

Apple has posted video of its closed iPod event yesterday, material Wall Street will no doubt seize upon to double-check its initial reaction to Jobs' return yesterday, when Apple shares hit a 52-week high but closed down 1 percent. It could have been worse, had Jobs been a no-show, a stock analyst tells the Wall Street Journal. Such is the demanding CEO's importance to Apple, and shareholders must now weigh Jobs' still-gaunt look and scratchy voice against his characteristically enthusiastic delivery.

Ideally they could take Jobs at his word, and leave the physical evaluations to the CEO's own medical caretakers. But Jobs' past obfuscations and distortions have made hard evidence an especially valuable commodity.

Sure, Apple's stock would have survived if he'd skipped out. But, as we wrote earlier today, it would have taken a hit. Many investors would have seen Jobs' absence as a conspicuous, out-of-character dodge by a leader known for his obsession with control and an amazing ability to extract money from worshipful customers via direct appeals. We were right to question the expectation that Jobs wouldn't show up; wrong to write that it was only a "remote" possibility.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that, as much as he hates providing information about his health, Jobs would rather calm Wall Street with a public appearance than spend months answering especially heated questions about his health, which would certainly have happened if he hadn't walked onto that Moscone Convention Center stage.

Now, of course, comes the endless analysis of how Jobs looked and sounded. We might as well get things started; above and below are Getty pictures of Jobs at this year's iPod event, on the left, next to pictures from last year's event, on the right. (Full-sized originals are here and here.) The CEO seems to have neither lost — nor added — much weight. But given the once-declining state of Jobs' health, no news is probably good news.

Will Apple's CEO, recently recovering from a liver transplant, step onto an Apple stage today, or won't he? The company isn't saying anything, but the consensus in the press is that he won't:

• Brad Stone of the New York Times: "With Mr. Jobs still convalescing from a liver transplant - and this being a somewhat minor news event - an appearance seems unlikely."
  
• Joseph Menn of the Financial Times: "But most analysts aren't expecting him this time around, in part because he is still recovering from a liver transplant that followed his bout with pancreatic cancer and in part because they don't think Apple has anything truly tremendous to roll out."
  
• John Gruber of Daring Fireball: "I hope he's up on stage doing his thing, but my gut still says no, that he's done as the company's spokesman."

So, wait a minute: Steve Jobs, the longtime face of Apple Inc., isn't going to run this little show, even though two publications, including the Wall Street Journal, say he is well enough to obsessively shepherd the development of a tablet device? Even though he's apparently driving himself to work again? And even though he's a control freak, famous for treating those around him at Apple like inept bozos? And even though he ran the same iPod event last year?

Sure, it's possible Jobs has carved out a brand-new role for himself at Apple as the behind-the-scenes product shepherd, and is skipping public events, at least until he has bulked back up again and appears more healthy. But if that's the case, Apple is going to have to pay in two big ways, neither of which Wall Street will be thrilled about: First, less free product hype in the press, since Phil Schiller lacks Jobs' charisma and fan base. Second, less transparency about the state of Jobs' health, since he's out of the public eye.

Indeed, the context of the Jobs health scare will make it harder for Apple investors to swallow the idea that Jobs would skip this event because it's too small time. The CEO knows his health is a longstanding issue on Wall Street, and he knows this event is one opportunity to allay concerns. If he's a no-show, some investors are going to see that through the prism of health and assume, at the very least, the he doesn't appear well enough, at the moment, to walk onto a stage.

There's also the remote possibility that Jobs will show, that Apple's led people to believe, or allowed them to believe, that he'll be absent in order to maximize the positive buzz when he actually shows up.

Whatever happens today with regard to the Apple CEO and his products, a new chapter will have unfurled in the great Steve Jobs Psychodrama, and Apple obsessives will have new information about their Dear Leader — he showed and looked like ______, or, more likely, he didn't show as expected — which they can spin in innumerable ways.

UPDATE: Jobs made a surprise appearance on stage.

(Pic: Jobs at a special iPod event September 9, 2008. Getty Images.)

It seems 42-year old Drudge, who spent many of his early years publishing on AOL, misunderstood the fundamental technology behind iDrudge. He thought the app was reading a pirated copy of the Drudge Report running on someone else's server, app creator Joseph Nardone told iPhone Savior. When it was explained to him that the app just downloaded the Drudge Report from Drudge's regular servers, and neatly reformatted it, he emailed Apple and asked for the app to be reinstated.

At the moment, the app still has not returned to App Store; Apple's approval process can take weeks, so Drudge's initial email is probably seriously cutting into Nardone's income, considering that iDrudge was once the store's number one news app. Imagine: Something inaccurate, written by Matt Drudge, causing people grief. Unprecedented.

Apparently Drudge is not bothered by the lack of advertising on the iDrudge app; as Nardone wrote in a comment we just now saw and approved under our original post, Drudge himself offers an ad-free mobile version of his site:

Hi:

Thanks for the publicity. The intent of the iDrudge Drudge Reader app was not to remove advertising from the Drudge Report. The Drudge Report already has a version with no ads at iDrudgeReport.com. The intention of the iDrudge Drudge Reader was to allow people who would not otherwise be able to view the Drudge Report on an iPhone due to the inconvenience of using the Safari browser to view the site. This should actually increase the traffic to the Drudge Report site and increase it's ability to attract revenue. The iDrudge Drudge Reader is merely a specialized web browser that is preset to view the Drudge Report.

Sincerely,
Joseph Nardone