And now, a confession from my inner geek:

I’m a Mac man.

I love my MacBook Pro (I’m typing on it right now) and use an iMac at my office at work, and keep my ears plugged into an iPod Touch on the way to work every morning. (I’ve resisted the iPhone, only because I already had a contract with Sprint when it popped onto the market, and I’ve heard less-than-stellar things about AT&T.)

So the prospect of what is now being called the “iSlate” is something intriguing to me — and the anticipation in the media worls is growing.  
(For the uninitiated: the “iSlate” is reported to be a larger incarnation of the iPhone, about 10-12 inches diagonally, with a touch screen that will allow it to be used as a computing tablet.)  Typing, computing, word processing and a host of applications will  be performed on the screen (as with the iPhone).  It will also, if rumors are to be believed, serve as an e-reader, like Amazon’s Kindle. 

The NY Times sets the bar:

Apple may be a late entrant to the market, but there is no reason to believe that its designers won’t be able to replicate their past success at battling against the laws of physics to produce a tablet that’s sleeker, lighter and generally hotter than anyone else’s, so much so that people will be willing to pay more for it.

The outcome of that battle will be even more important when it comes to the “more” element of the iSlate. Like many new digital devices, it will combine several products in one. An extreme example is the iPhone. It fulfills the functions of dozens of products including a watch, diary, alarm clock, barometer, satellite navigation system, Internet browser, dictionary, DVD player and MP3 player as well as a phone, and that’s before we come on to those 100,000 apps. The iSlate will do lots of that stuff too, as well as basic computing. Critically it will also act as an electronic reader, like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader.

Many people like their e-readers (not least because they save them from having to haul around books, newspapers and magazines) but I’ve yet to meet anyone who loves them. That’s the key. If a really great e-reader appeared, the market would explode. The e-reader is waiting for a killer product, just as the MP3 player was before Apple’s iPod. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, it made such a sexy one that many more people wanted to buy it. That’s what it is promising to do again.

If it comes through, demand for electronic books, newspapers and magazines should soar. This will create an exciting design challenge for their publishers to develop seductive ways of presenting their content on e-readers. In theory, e-newspapers could combine the convenience of the printed product with the dynamism of their Web sites. And e-magazines should be more visually compelling with higher resolution images than their Web versions. As well as helping publishers to tackle the thorny problem of how to make money from the Internet, it could enable them to create dazzling new e-media.

That’s why an important element of the iSlate will be another contemporary design essential — a great service design concept. For the iPod, that’s the iTunes music store, and for the iPhone, the App Store. The iSlate’s equivalent will be a fun, simple system with which we can download e-content.

We should know soon what Apple has up its sleeve — and if it promises to revolutionize electronic media. Could this be the salvation of newspapers? Magazines? Western civilization as we know it? 

Stay tuned.