What will Apple’s tablet do differently?

It seems pretty likely that Apple will be releasing a tablet computer in 2010 since there has been a wide range of articles in the past few months that speculate about such a device. Tablet computers can be thought of as small, lightweight laptops without a traditional keyboard. Instead the user typically interacts with the computer via a touchscreen or a stylus. Tablet computers have been around, in the world of Windows-based computers, for the past half dozen years but they have never experienced wide-appeal.

Apple has scheduled a media event for January 26th. It is widely suspected that Apple will announce their new tablet computer though it won’t likely start to ship until a few months from then. Here’s a link to a story that summarizes the breadth of speculation written in the past months about Apple’s tablet computer. I’m more interested in knowing what Apple’s tablet will be able to do and how Apple intends to innovate tablet computers to make them mainstream devices. This article has some interesting thoughts about this. Check it out.