Apple's Q3 Financial call may or may not have pointed to a new Mac tablet offering but that doesn't really matter. The Mac tablet isn't a rumor any more, Robert. It's right here sitting in my pocket. If the iPhone isn't a Mac tablet, I don't know what is. It runs OS X. It has a full touch interface. OS X + touch == Mac tablet, any way you look at it.

The computing world is changing. We're no longer tied to desktops. We move around, we take our computing with us. Holding a computer in the crook of our arms isn't just a nice idea, it's practical. When you're walking through hospital halls, sitting in on a University lecture, attending business meetings, or specing out a project at a construction site, the tablet computer makes sense. If anything, the iPhone which has been pushed far beyond its original design specs, has proven that people want truly mobile computing. No keyboard, no standard screen -- true portability.

And it's not just about people who spend their lives away from their desks. Drawing directly on a screen beats the heck out of drawing on a Wacom tablet. Tablet computing brings the artist directly to the canvas. And it doesn't stop at drawing. How do traditional laptops and computer screens integrate meaningfully in any way into creating music. Sure, we're used to the standard tools but isn't a piano keyboard or a guitar a more natural interface into music? Let musicians jot notes into a portable tablet rather than figuring out how to keep moving between instrument and computer keyboard.

Cell phones and tablet computers are all about freeing ourselves. Sure you can bring a laptop on a camping trip or into the grocery store -- but an iPhone or a small tablet mac work much better on the go. So, say "Yes" to tablets. In fact, say "Heck Yes". Because we don't have to wait for Apple to deliver one any more. iPhone and App Store already have.

Since Apple's third quarter conference call, the rumor mill has been grinding its latest batch of corn: or what natives call "the MacBook tablet." The endless list of features, the bad Photoshop: It's already here.

Every time Apple has whetted our appetites for new products, the same people keep predicting a tablet-style device, and, since the Newton, they've yet to be right.

I know tablets are useful to some, but is Apple going to make one? Not just no: Heck no. Picture trying to drive with your hands in front of your face the whole time. If you design with a computer, a tablet of any kind just isn't for you.

Join me for a medium-sized rant about this Mac tablet, why it's a bad for Apple, and why they won't sell it.

Apple posted record earnings yesterday, yet the stock still dropped amid concerns over Steve Jobs' health (I'll refrain from speculating because I find it tasteless and it's none of my business) and lower projected gross margins for the September quarter (Q4). Although Apple is famous for under-promising/over-delivering, especially when it comes to projected sales and gross margin performance, during yesterday's call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer offered up a very interesting explanation for Apple's lower estimates: new products!

Although Apple historically has a lower gross margins in the September quarter because of the Back-to-School promotion, Apple also added that a "new product that [it] [couldn't] discuss" would also result in lower gross-margins. Throughout the call, Oppenheimer kept throwing out phrases like "product transition," "new additions to the product line" and a little mantra that went something like, "Apple makes state of the art new products that the competition just can't match. When we do that earlier in an introduction, costs are higher."

We had a good time speculating what new products/changes to the product line will appear in September (or in the 4th quarter, more accurately) in the liveblog and the press has joined in that speculation today. ZDNet thinks that products will be brought out at lower prices, so that Apple can drive volume and gain marketshare. Over at eWeek, they are guessing everything from a shift in microprocessors, to low-cost portables aimed at schools to revamped AppleTVs.

The general thought (or wish) in our chat last night centered around new MacBook Pros, lower priced Airs and revamped Minis or other headless Macs.

My personal speculation is that while I expect current line products to drop in price a bit (not a huge drop, but a drop), and think it is high time for a MacBook Pro redesign, I'm going to guess that new displays are part of the "transition." The Apple Cinema Display line is not only overpriced, it is long-in-the-tooth when compared to products in its pricepoint (or even lower pricepoints). OLED displays could be expensive, and it would certainly be technology that no one else is pushing.

For me, the key to Oppenheimer's words wasn't just the talk of lower gross margins -- because that doesn't necessarily mean lower prices -- it was all the talk of "state of the art products that the competition just can't match." That signifies something that the competition (presumably, HP and Dell) isn't already selling a product or technology that Apple is looking at introducing. With the number of patents Apple has, there is plenty of room for speculation.

What are your best (or most outrageous) guesses? Leave them in the comments and we'll all see how wrong (or right) we are in September.

When the App Store went live on the 10th, I went a little nuts and downloaded a bunch of apps. Some I fell in love with. Some I launched once. Others lingered a for a few days while I decided their fate.

Now it's nearly two weeks later, and I've identified the keepers. Here I'll list each one as well as why and how I use them. As a bonus, I'll identify the three that have made the cut to my main screen -- what I'm calling my "front page apps."

Read the list after the jump.

This liveblog will be relaying and discussing Apple's Q3 financial results. Apple's third fiscal quarter encompassed sales between April 1, 2008 and June 30, 2008. Apple reported a record-breaking quarter, with revenue up 38% year over year and Mac sales at an all time high!

You can listen in live here. Please join me in the blog to discuss the results, speculate

So the first generation of games and apps is in the iPhone's App Store, and as predicted, we've got more than our share of accelerometer races and the usual gaming standbys -- Tetris, poker, and even some nice tech demos like Andy Qua's Cube Runner. But now it's time to iterate and see if we can't start filling some of the promises a great would-be gaming platform like the iPhone offers. How about an in-depth RPG that uses the clock or camera, or a full-length platformer, or a social game that takes advantage of things like location awareness?

Italian company KikiTechonlogy dropped us a note to say they're doing their part -- they're working on a full-length, console-style RPG for the iPhone called PanfobiA. Unfortunately, we hope the game's translation is better than their blog post -- they're working towards "performing not less than 100 hours in single player," and "Online Gameing Modality," which is supposed to be some type of online gameplay after the singleplayer experience. The pictures provide a little more hope -- they show a nice sense of art direction and some old-school style RPG characters.

But even if PanfobiA is nothing but vaporware, they've got the right idea. For years, PDAs and mobile phones have had games, but they've all boiled down to poker, puzzles, and putrid junk. Now that the App Store is up and running, we can't wait for a developer to step up and provide a really deep and satisfying gaming experience on the platform.

Imagine you are a software development company that has been around for 11 years, with award-winning titles for mobile computing devices. You follow the rules, you submit iPhone versions of your applications to the App Store, and yet you still haven't seen your programs make it to the store.

This is the boat that a lot of developers are in, but it is particularly frustrating for Ilium Software. Ilium has sold two well-respected applications -- eWallet and ListPro -- for Palm OS and Windows Mobile devices for years, and has a number of other commercial and free mobile applications on the market.

According to Ilium spokesperson Ellen Craw, eWallet has been "in the queue" at Apple for over two weeks, and they can't get any word from App Store personnel on when their highly anticipated app will actually appear online. The comments in Ilium's blog are particularly revealing, as longtime customers are also frustrated by the black hole at Apple.

Having used Ilium's products before, I'm waiting for both ListPro and eWallet to show up in the store to fill those niches on my iPhone. What other great products are being held up by Apple? We'd love to know!

Well, Merlin, you did ask.

Having listed some imaginary iPhone apps he'd like to see, Merlin Mann asked the world: "What's the iPhone app you crave?" Hmm, let me see now - I've got a little list.

• Avant Go: A fantastic portable newsagent, in which you could download whole chunks of your favourite magazine and newspaper web sites for offline reading. I used to read dozens of articles in Avant Go on my train commutes in and out of London, back in the days when I commuted. It was an absolutely essential app and I'm very much looking forward to it - or something similar - arriving on iPhone.
• Yojimbo or Notational Velocity for iPhone: See yesterday's rant. If this, or something like this, isn't right round the corner, I shall eat my router.
• TextMate or Bean: This is dependent on Apple opening up Bluetooth to other devices in a future software update. If I could use a full-size external keyboard to quickly write text, I'd want a decent editor to write it in.

What iPhone apps are you craving? Let us know in the comments.

In the Electronic Arts booth here at E3, nestled in among the raucous noises of various first-person shooters, is a completely white room with a few cell phones on tables. This is the EA Mobile space, and it was here that we got to play Spore Origins, the iPhone version of Will Wright's sure-to-be masterpiece.

Like the EA Mobile space, Spore Origins is pretty simple and clean, and stands out as a fairly calm experience among the racket of a lot of other iPhone games. Spore takes you through a civilization from ameoba to space travel, but Spore Origins sticks with just the ameoba stage. You play a creature of your own creation and float through the microbial ether, eating things that are smaller than you, and running away from things that are larger.

Read on for TUAW's impressions of one of the most anticipated iPhone games, and why it might not be all we had hoped.

Contrary to other analysts' rosy comments about Apple's supply chain, Gene Munster from Piper Jaffray is estimating that shortages in the supply of iPhone 3G handsets will last until mid-August.

Munster said that he'd wager "we'll see problems for another two to four weeks," adding, "early demand has been more than [Apple] expected."

Apple's own supply-checking tool reports that a little over a quarter of Apple Stores had iPhone 3Gs to sell today. The hardest model to find is the black, 16GB version. It was available in only 18 stores worldwide.

AT&T stores are also "nearly out."

[Via Macworld.]

I'm here at E3 in Los Angeles all this week (come say hi at the Joystiq meetup tonight if you're in town!). Yesterday, I got to sit down with Brad Pitser, the Director of Global Production for THQ Wireless, a company that makes games for mobile platforms like the iPhone. Pitser has helped oversee two iPhone games so far: De Blob (now on the App Store) and Star Wars' Force Unleashed (coming out later this year -- Joystiq has my impressions of both). He said that developing for the iPhone so far has been "a dream." They've partnered with Apple to publish on the iPhone and iPod touch as much as they can. "Apple was interested in our brands," Pitser said, "and we were interested in their platform."

One concern he does have about the App Store so far is the pricing -- "everyone thinks $9.99 is too much," he told me. THQ released De Blob at the $6.99 price point. He says THQ has a lot of licensing fees and costs to pay for every game they make, and when those games compete with software that sells for 99 cents, they don't necessarily have a money-making proposition. But at the same time, he'd rather let the market figure things out -- the App Store has a lot of settling down to do, and Pitser is sure that companies will find their place in the price plan soon enough.

I asked him what he thought of what he'd seen in the software that wasn't his, and he said he really enjoyed the iPint visual gag, the UrbanSpoon restaurant finder, and Aurora Feint (all very nice choices). It's great to have a bigger company like THQ interested in getting some good licenses on the iPhone, and hopefully we'll see more come out of Pitser and the division he oversees.

You got your iPhone. You got your computer. Your emails sync. Your contacts sync. Your calendars sync. Your music, your podcasts, your photos, all your stuff: it just syncs. This is good.

Your notes? They don't sync.

This. Is. Bad.

Not just bad, but actually driving me nuts. It drives me nuts because I can't believe there's a technical challenge to be overcome here. On the iPhone, you have your Notes app in which you write text notes. How hard can it be to sync them up with something on the computer to which the iPhone is attached?

A friend says to me: "Sync them where? With Stickies?" He has a point - there's no obvious, existing place for text notes to go, but again, that doesn't sound to me like something that need be a problem. Let's have a simple desktop app called, um, Notes, with which the iPhone version syncs. OK, even Stickies if we have to. All I want to do is easily reach my iPhone-jotted notes when I'm working on the Mac.

Yes, I know about the work-arounds. I could use a Drafts folder in an IMAP account. I could add notes to a contact. I could just email stuff back and forth to myself. But none of these fits in with the way I work already, all of them are work-arounds. We're talking about text notes here: there shouldn't be any need for work-arounds. I look forward to a simple solution appearing in the App Store soon.

That said, despite the horrible Marker Felt font, I quite like the Notes app. I just wish it would sync. Is that too much to ask?

Most of you will have heard of Fraser Speirs. He's the developer behind FlickrExport and now Exposure for iPhone.

This week he's made two consecutive and interesting posts that show what it's been like to be a software developer during the first few days of the Store's operation.

In one post, he complains about the review process imposed on not just every app, but every update to every app that gets submitted to the Store. Things are not being reviewed fast enough, he says: "If Apple can't guarantee a maximum 24 hour review process, they should drop it."

In the second, Fraser reveals that Exposure has been downloaded an average of 3,200 times per day since the Store opened. It already has more users than FlickrExport for Aperture, a much older and better-established product.

"These are crazy numbers," he says. His point is simple: the iPhone as a platform is going to be huge. In fact, it's going to be "Apple's mainstream platform for 2012 and beyond." Now there's a prediction.

According to a survey from the Gartner group, Apple is again the third largest PC vendor in the United States. The company nosed out Acer for the second-quarter bronze. (Dell is number one, followed by HP in second place.)

Apple shipped 1.4 million units last quarter, 38 percent more than the prior quarter. In the United States, PC shipments overall grew by just 4.2 percent.

IDC research manager David Daoud credited Apple's competitors with the company's success, citing consumers' disappointment with the "lack of innovation" among other PC manufacturers. Also: Windows Vista. 'Nuff said.

But that's just the U.S. Apple still lags worldwide, selling only 3.2 percent more units abroad than last quarter. Compare that to other manufacturers, who sold an average of 16 percent more units.

Macs account for nearly 8 percent of internet-connected computers worldwide.

[Via Infoworld.]

As the iTunes Store has grown, its search feature hasn't. Enter a bit of text in the search field, and you get results for

1. Albums
2. Podcasts
3. Movies
4. TV seasons
5. Music videos
6. iTunes Essentials
7. iTunes U
8. Apps

The results were manageable when we were just browsing music, television and movies. Today, it's just too large. Even some of the sub-categories are getting crowded. Recently, the App store was receiving a lot of eBooks from AppEngines. Earlier this week, a "Books" section was added to the App Store.

That's a good step, but I'd like to be able to filter results before execution. For example, an App Store search, a music search or podcasts. iTunes Power Search [link] does this pretty well, but I'd bet that most users don't use it. This ought to be the default search procedure.

Of course, I'm old and crotchety, so take this with a gain of iSalt.

Thanks to Matt for the eBook App Store tip!