Displays are one of the most valued aspects of an electronic. Consumers purchase these devices because of their ability to provide a living room on the go.  Now we’re interacting with these screens. The iPhone’s flickering gesture between photos continues to amaze people. Cheapness is the label given to devices with poor display quality. Display quality, however, is not the only place manufacturers can add value. R&D labs are busy working on some of the following:

Anti-KFC Smudge Resistance: None of us want our devices looking like we just used them after hitting up some KFC. The smudge from finger prints can either hinder video quality or simply make the product look unappealing. Manufacturers realize the importance of beautiful devices and that’s why scientists are trying to better understand the chemical properties of smudge free attributes. At the 238^th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, Dr. Steven R. Carlo explained his tests to determine the chemical composition and effectiveness of smudge resistant materials. There’s already devices such as the iPhone 3GS that reduce the amount of smudge, but definitely does not eliminate it as you can see from a post by Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Double Whammy Dual Screen:  Virtual keyboards that are offered on slate tablets usually take up about half of the screen which makes them small and harder to type on while diminishing the amount of content you can view. Asus first showed off their dual screen laptop at CeBit last march. Think of it as two slates stuck together with a hinge. The Eee Reader, which comes in 6″ or 9″ gray scale touchscreens, closely resembles a book which is no coincidence since it will actually be launched as an e-reader. You’ll be able to use either screen as a virtual keyboard, e-reader, or web browser – whatever combination you can think off. Where’s the value? Amazon.com’s Kindle doesn’t surf the interweb highways!

3D Displays Without Nerdy Glasses: Earlier this month during the Nokia World event in Germany, Nokia was boasting a small tablet with a 3D screen which doesn’t require traditional glasses. Even though this might be a neat innovation, some analysts point out that with little support for content and a new format war brewing that could send prices higher, 3D platforms going mainstream may still be years away.

OLED Eye Candy:  Zune HD turned heads last week with its stunning 3.5″ OLED display. Brighter with greater color contrast and less power hungry, these OLEDs are known to make scleras salivate. They are usually as thin as 0.2mm which makes them paper-flexible.  Currently there aren’t any medium or large size OLED net tablets that I know about, though they have been found on an increasing number of mobile phones. But we can’t allow ourselves to not mention an Apple rumor now can we? In August, Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research claims hearing that an Apple tablet will sport an 8″ or 10″ OLED screen.

Google yesterday introduced Fast Flip, a web app which is basically screen shots of news websites that you can easily flip through rapidly and are organized by topic categories. As Google explains, one of the problems with newspaper and magazine sites is their inability to load quickly, an obstacle that Google sees in trying to scan headlines and content like you would when holding a newspaper or magazine. Now with Fast Flip, you can scan headlines and read articles just like flipping through pages of the real McCoy. Part of the success of a product like this would rest on how quickly these “slides” would load, and Google has done an excellent job at this end. In addition, there’s also a mobile version for Android devices and the iPhone.

On a touchscreen tablet, such an application most certainly makes it more easier to view headlines and read the first few paragraphs than clicking on links and waiting for them to load.  An easy application, it is another why-didn’t-I-think-of-that service from Google that attempts to make lives easier…or busier.

With Fast Flip, some may say that Google is closing the gap between publishers and digital media. It can also be seen as upping the ante on its war against Amazon’s Kindle, first with Google Book partnerships and now with Fast Flip. Steve Jobs could be correct – dedicated devices like the Kindle e-reader, which can’t browse the web, might end up losing while tablets that can do both will win. But Google is not the only one that realized that readers require newspaper-like experience on the web. The New York Times’ Times Reader, which requires a subscription fee of $3.45 a week, is also a similar application though its a desktop app that runs on Adobe Air and can only view NYT articles.

Yesterday was Apple’s Rock & Roll event, a hyped up and iPod themed event that saw the release of an iPod nano with a camera and a new iPod Touch and iPod classic. But none of those devices sound anything like a tablet and neither did Steve Jobs or marketing executive Philip Schiller make any mention of it.

One of the unique dimensions of Apple rumors is that since there are more rumors flying than bees in a beehive on a hot summer afternoon, you can assess who was wrong with their predictions. If we go by the assumption that no other Apple product announcements will occur this year because it is unlikely that Apple will schedule two major events in less than 4 months, we can say that whoever predicted that the Apple tablet will be released/announced in the fall will be deemed to be incorrect. Credit must be given to Mac|Life and IntoMobile for already compiling an exhaustive history of Apple tablet rumors that go back as early as 2001.

In the order that these rumors were published, first up is TechCrunch, when Michael Arrington in late 2008 mentioned that “three independent sources close to Apple” said that an iPod Touch device with a 7 or 9 inch screen will be released in the fall of 2009. Comments galore totaling 507 ensued.

Taiwan publisher InfoTime gets jealous and in July 2009 claimed that a netbook with a touchscreen will debut in October 2009. TheStreet also goes on record saying that an Apple tablet will be released by the end of 2009.

Also in July 2009, Financial Times correspondent Matthew Garrahan feels the need to generate buzz by saying that a full-featured tablet should make it in time for Christmas 2009.

Then Barron’s decided to make a late jump in August stating that a “veteran analyst” said that a tablet device could be announced in September for a November release date. I also want to be a veteran analyst. Where do I apply?

No one knows who erred: the writers reporting these rumors or their sources that all too often are “familiar with the matter” and “close to Apple”. To be fair, businesses are constantly changing their prior decisions. It may very well be true that Apple was going to release a tablet this year but changed its plans  for whatever reason. We will wait till next year to asses independent reports by AppleInsider and Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, both stating that the tablet is due in the first half of 2010.

Knight Ridder, the second largest US newspaper publisher at the time before being bought by McClatchy Co., had already conceptualized the tablet form factor for information consumption along with a number of Web 2.0 features popularized by the turn of this century.

In a 1994 Knight Ridder promotional video for a device that strikes a surreal yet chilling resembles with Amazon.com’s Kindle line of e-readers, the narrator explains the future of tablets and how they would eventually replace newspapers.

This device is under development at consumer electronics companies around the world.  Tablets will be a whole new class of computers.  They’ll weigh under 2 pounds. They’ll be totally portable.  They’ll have a clarity of screen display, comparable to ink on paper. They’ll be able to blend text, video, audio, and graphics together. And they’ll be part of our daily lives around the turn of the century. We may still use computers to create information, but we’ll use the tablet to interact with information. Reading, watching, listening.

Similarly, the current portable Kindle weighs less than 2 pounds and displays text using E Ink electronic paper technology on a high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper. It will be strictly a consumption device, a phrase now most often used by Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch who is now heading efforts for the upcoming CrunchPad tablet.

The video also explained many aggregate and social features of the web that became popular just a few years ago.

On first glance, it looks just like a printed newspaper. In fact, you can browse stories and turn pages just as you would on paper. But if a story interests you, you can read it more deeply.

This concept explains what we now know as aggregation, or RSS feeds, where only the headlines are viewed, and a click takes you to an abstract (the first few lines). Upon one more click, and it takes you to the full article.

The tablet paper even flags items of special interest to you. We’ve included a personal profile page, where you can tell the newspaper to find ads or stories to match your interests. You can see an index of the entire newspaper, with items that match your special interests high-lighted. Turn to a set of abstracts that match your personal profile, and jump from the index or the abstract to the full story.  articles or send them electronically to a friend.

The personal profile page is exactly the same concept as personal web portals such as iGoogle, Pageflakes,  and Netvibes, where you can select news related keywords that should appear on your front page. But in the video, it also talks about selecting what advertisements you want to see, something which I haven’t seen yet. Rather what Google does is learn what advertisements you would like to see, and target subsequent ads accordingly.

But moving to a new form, doesn’t mean you should give up anything, including the ability to save and share pieces of the newspaper.Just like the printed form, with the tablet newspaper, you can clip and save

Here again, Kinight Ridder had thought of information that can be clipped, saved, and shared, three words that are synonymous with Web 2.0 buzz term. Services such as Clipmarks, ClipClip, and Google Notebook allow you to do just that and more, such as the ability to clip images and videos too.

The tablet never went passed the development stage. With the death of Kight Ridder’s chairman and hardware obstacles related to the bulkiness of the device, the project was shut down in 1995. At the time, Knight Ridder said the device was already under development, which throws more light onto a post made by Kevin Fox of Google in May 2001, stating that “At least five times in the past 10 years engineers at Apple have worked on initiatives to bring a full-sized tablet-based computer to market.”

A commenter by the name of Joe Pezzillo mentions that the Knight Ridder Lab where this was being conceptualized was right across the hall from the  Apple Electronic Media Lab in Boulder, CO where he used to work.

From Mashable.