IS APPLE PLANNING TO RELEASE AN 'ISLATE' TABLET PC EARLY NEXT YEAR? - Batteries - Green Series Battery, Notebook, Laptop Battery, Digital Camera Camcorder PDA Batteries & Adapter Charger from Laptopcharge.com

There is a rumor that Apple is releasing a new tablet PC early next year, called 'iSlate'
There is a rumor that Apple is releasing a new tablet PC early next year. Macrumors.com has recently written about Apple Inc's purchase of the domain name 'islate.com'. This has caused many to speculate that Apple's new tablet PC will be called 'iSlate'. Whilst this is just speculation, The Washington Post has expanded on this story, and highlighted the fact that several 'islate' domains have been registered by 'Mark Monitor', someone who apparently works with Apple in securing domain registrations (such as islate.jp and islate.fr).

Macrumors.com has demonstrated that islate.com is registered by Mark Monitor, but registration details were altered temporarily in 2007 to reflect Apple Inc as the owner, thereby confirming Apple's involvement with islate domain registrations. The Washington Post has also discovered that a company called Slate Computing has filed for the trademark 'iSlate', in the US and Europe. The newspaper suggests that this is a company set up purely for this purpose, with the aim of keeping Apple's involvement with the name 'iSlate' secret.

The consensus is that Apple's involvement with the domain registrations and possible involvement with Slate Computing, is evidence that it wishes to protect the name iSlate because it intends to use the name for its rumored tablet PC. A company such as Apple would probably behave this way, although its attempts at secrecy have clearly failed. However Apple has a motive for protecting certain names that have the prefix 'i': this nomenclature is synonymous with its products.

Whether or not the tablet PC will materialise next year is another matter, but the cost of securing a few domain names and a trademark costs relatively little to a successful company such as Apple. Therefore, this news is no real indication of Apple's imminent plans, and it may have secured other domain names with the prefix 'i' in the past, without any concrete plans to release products under such names.