Apple Issues Invitations for January 27th Media Event - Tablet Rumored

Yes the rumors are true. Apple is holding an event on January 27th to show off something the company is calling their “latest creation.”  The proceedings will take place at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco, and will get underway at 10AM Pacific.

Update on Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 12:50AM by Jon Arnason

Here are some juicy bits from the Wall Street Journal:

• The tablet will come with a virtual keyboard — kind of a no-brainer if it’s gonna be a keyboard-less tablet and not, say, another laptop.
• Apple’s been talking with The New York Times, Conde Nast, and HarperCollins / News Corp. over how they could collaborate. When asked, NYT Chairman Arthur Sulzberger would only say “stay tuned.”
• Electronic Arts has been working closely to prep games for the tablet. We know of a number of gaming journalists who’ve gotten invites to next week’s event, and given Apple’s heavy games push over the past year or so, this wouldn’t surprise us in the least.
• A reaffirmation of earlier murmurings about potentially swapping Google for Bing as the default search engine.
• Those TV subscription rumors? Apparently the gang in Cupertino have been pitching a “best of TV” service that would package the best four to six shows per channel.
• A web-based version of iTunes, tentatively called iTunes.com and potentially launching in June, for buying music outside of the dedicated app. Additionally, there’d be a new initiative “to populate as many webs ites as possible with ‘buy’ buttons, integrating iTunes transactions into activities like listening to internet radio and surfing review web sites.” No mention if music will be downloaded or streamed from the cloud, but we can definitely see how Apple’s recent Lala acquisition would play into this in the future — in fact, we’ve already seen it start to bear fruit.
• Here’s a weird one: Apple has supposedly designed the tablet “so that it is intuitive to share.” One such experiment is virtual sticky notes that launch for the intended recipient by facial recognition via built-in camera.