www.apple.com/ipod/start

The technology rumor mill is busy grinding speculation regarding an Apple event Wednesday at which the culture-changing firm will unveil its “latest creation.”

“The irony is that it is no longer about hardware, it is about services that connect to the hardware,” Levy said.

“The iPod was just a media player but what made it special was iTunes and the online App Store.”

An Apple tablet would likely synch with iTunes and the more than 100,000 applications at the App Store.

Apple’s tablet is believed to be a notepad-shaped device with a 10-inch color screen that lets people browse the Web, listen to music, watch movies or television shows and also read electronic books and newspapers.

A tablet would be Apple’s first major product release since it came out with its winning iPhone

Despite Apple’s wizardry with creations embraced by mainstream culture as well as technophiles, it could be tilting against windmills by releasing a tablet computer.

“The real question is what will people do with an Apple tablet that they can’t do pretty well on some other device?” said NPD Group analyst Stephen Baker. “Anyone that has tried this has failed.”

The success of iPhones was “a no-brainer” because the innovative devices put telephone and rich Internet capabilities in people’s pockets, according to Baker.

Tablets, on the other hand, are awkwardly large to be carried as mobile devices and too small to compete with desktop computers and screens, especially for tasks such as movie viewing.

“What do I do, strap it to my dog’s back?” Baker said facetiously.

“I can’t sneak a peak at it when my kids are in a play or at a baseball game… I’m a hardware guy and this isn’t going to be a game changer.”

A Retrevo report release last week concluded that an Apple tablet priced at more than 700 dollars (US) would stop 70 percent of potential buyers from reaching for their wallets.

Apple could launch a tablet at a steep price but quickly discount it through subsidy deals with carriers or digital content sellers.

“Initially it will seem like a high price, but over time Ma and Pa will be able to buy it as well as rabid Apple fans,” Levy said.

Google could prove to be a formidable rival, with the Internet giant’s Android operating system built into a host of tablets shown off at a major Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this month.

An Android Market featuring more than 20,000 applications tailored for devices running on the operating system is a growing competitor to Apple’s market-leading App Store.

“In many ways, Apple is running away with the prize and Google is establishing itself as a strong second,” Levy said.

Microsoft is also staking out territory in the tablet market, with chief executive Steve Ballmer using CES as a stage to tout a Hewlett-Packard Slate tablet built with the firm’s software.

“There really isn’t another compelling device out there,” Levy said. “As it did with the iPhone, Apple is competing in a category of one at this point.”

Expectation that the maker of iPhones and iPods is set to wow the world with a tablet computer is so rampant that the California company’s stock could suffer if it fails to deliver.

“This proposed Apple tablet will take the App Store and iPhone operating system and deliver it in a larger form factor instead of starting from scratch,” said Canada-based independent technology analyst Carmi Levy.

“Apple can take years worth of iPhone momentum and drive it right into what is essentially an iPhone on steroids,” he continued.

three years ago.

Online retail powerhouse Amazon.com beefed up its market-leading Kindle electronic reader devices just days ago in apparent preparation for an Apple onslaught.

Amazon pumped up royalties it pays to authors or publishers who offer digitized books for sale to Kindle users and invited software savants to craft fun or functional programs for the e-readers.

“Amazon may have won the e-book reader battle, but the war is about far bigger things,” Levy said. “It is about a device that can do many things as you bring your digital content with you.”

While the spotlight at the Apple event may be on a tablet, the success of such a device depends more on the “ecosystem” of applications and services than it does on how “sexy” the hardware may be, according to the analyst.

 Heady from the success of the iPhone and iPod, Apple is getting spanked with criticism, even mockery, by pundits who expected the company to change the world anew with its iPad tablet computer.

Critics and fans were rushing Thursday to fill the 60-day void between the unveiling of what Apple chief executive Steve Jobs hailed as a “revolutionary” device and the time the first models will begin shipping globally.

While some heralded the iPad as a powerful “Kindle killer” with multimedia capabilities that eclipse current electronic readers, others scoffed at the idea of adding to their lives a mobile gadget seemingly named for a feminine hygiene product.

“Clearly, women are not finding this name attractive,” said analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley. “The name looks like a mistake a man would make. Steve should have spent more time talking to his wife and daughters.”

Reaction by women echoed a video clip from an old skit by the Mad TV comedy television show about a fictitious high-tech tampon called an “iPad.” The video has gone viral since Jobs uncloaked the iPad on Wednesday.

The mixed reaction to the color touchscreen tablet was reflected in two of the most popular gadget websites.

Gizmodo published an “Eight things that suck about the iPad” story while rival Ubergizmo crowned the device “the best tablet ever built.” Newspaper industry sizes up iPad’s potential

Popular complaints included the lack of a camera, multi-tasking capabilities, a USB port, and support for videos made with Adobe Flash software.

Enderle recalled that “there is an extensive list of people who just pissed all over the iPhone when it launched.

“The iPad will advance a lot,” he said. “Generation three will probably be the killer product.”

It was a third generation iPhone, tied to an online store for fun applications, that catapulted the Apple smartphones to the top of the market and brought billions of dollars to the firm’s coffers.

“There are a number of things that have to come together to make this the ‘Jesus Pad’ people imagined,” Enderle said. “The iPhone wasn’t that great when it came out either.”

Apple worked its marketing magic and built up hype and anticipation before the iPad unveiling, but has left two months for pundits, bloggers and others to nitpick a device that Jobs said must be held to be appreciated.

Still, some technology analysts predict the iPad will be the best-selling electronics device of 2010.

Unveiling the notebook-sized iPad, Jobs admitted he was taking a gamble by trying to carve out an entirely new device category between the laptop computer and the smartphone.

“We think we’ve got the goods,” Jobs said. “We think we’ve done it.”

Reviewers were mixed on whether the iPad will be a smash hit like the iPod, which controls over 70 percent of the market for MP3 players, or the iPhone, which completely transformed the smartphone arena.

The tech blog of Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said that after months of pre-launch hype, “expectations for the new Apple product were so high they were difficult to fulfill.”

Spain’s El Pais said the iPad opens up a new avenue for content creators struggling to adapt to the digital era, while a Los Angeles newspaper referred to the device as a large iPhone without the phone.

Om Malik of tech blog GigaOm said the iPad is “made for the consumption of digital media: games, music, photos, videos, magazines, newspapers and e-books.”

He called iPad the “ideal device for today’s world.”

Claudine Beaumont, technology writer for Britain’s Daily Telegraph, hailed the sleekness of the iPad, its reading software and virtual keyboard.

“It won’t replace your laptop, but I think it may have sounded the death knell for notebook computers,” she wrote.

MG Siegler of tech blog TechCrunch, after playing with the iPad, said “it felt like I was holding the future” but may not be a “must-have” device yet.

“The iPod Touch is a significant step toward finally making tablets respectable,” Forrester analyst James McQuivey said in a blog post.

“But making tablets respectable should have been the least of Apple’s ambitions.”

Users eager to judge for themselves will have to wait two months before the first iPads are shipped worldwide at an entry-level price of 499 dollars.