Could Apple's Tablet be a Savior for Print Publications?

The New York Times - Later this month, we all might get a glimpse of that future. According to The Financial Times, Apple has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and is expected to make a major product announcement on Tuesday, Jan. 26, where many have speculated that some version of the Apple tablet will be unveiled. The Web site Gizmodo guessed that the device was likely to be called the iSlate, will cost around $800, and won’t hit store shelves until March or possibly April. (And it’s not just Apple: Word of a color tablet device called Courier from Microsoft made a big splash on the site as well, and a company called HTC reportedly has one in the works that uses the Google Chrome operating system. And there are others.)

The secretive Apple has made fools out of predictors in the past, but Kai-Fu Lee, the former head of Google in China, posted an item on his personal blog suggesting the Apple tablet would feature a 10.1-inch multitouch screen with three-dimensional graphics. And it’s worth pointing out that many publishers are building content in the belief that when it comes to the tablet, it’s not if, it’s when.

So, is the Apple tablet a figment of so much Web-borne pixie dust or is it the second coming of the iPhone, a so-called Jesus tablet that can do anything, including saving some embattled print providers from doom?