ReadWriteWeb

Unless you have been living in a soundproof cave for the past few weeks, you are probably well aware that today is Apple tablet day. Today, our friends over at social media monitoring and analytics firm Sysomos took a closer look at the hype and how the rumors have resonated on Twitter, YouTube and blogs over the last 30 days. According to Sysomos' data, for example, Twitter users sent more than half a million messages - with an average of 6,545 tweets per hour - with both words apple and tablet in them.

While there are a million rumors over what Apple's new tablet will do, from having a built-in Web cam to doing your laundry (not really), we can be sure that it will at least have a color display and show pictures, right? These simple features would put it well ahead of the Kindle in the newspaper industry's hopes of finding a savior in new technology.

A study out of the University of Georgia took a look at whether or not the Kindle would be a viable substitute for the traditional newspaper and it found the device lacking in a few key areas.

I'm just aching to know if the new Apple tablet (insert caveats, weasel words and qualifiers here) is a potential Cintiq competitor. I don't think it will be, but you never know. It may also have a built in barometer and bird call generator.

I'm never sure if Apple does themselves more good than harm with the secrecy and anticipation that surrounds the run-up to these announcements. Unless there's something truly jaw-dropping about whatever device rises from the stage when Steve Jobs reaches that particular slide in Keynote, the reaction may be muted disappointment: "Oh." "Huh." "Wait a minute... my life is still the same miasma of thwarted potential and spiritual anomie that it was half an hour ago!"

Ever since Jeff Han demoed his Multi-Touch Workstation at the 2006 TED Conference, the world has been waiting for a high resolution sensory work experience. As a generation of hunched night creatures with intimate knowledge of our chiropractors, we've suffered and conformed to our traditional interfaces for too long. Touch was the future of workstations. But as articulated by ReadWriteWeb, the upcoming Apple tablet is not the workstation of the near future. It simply isn't practical. For those of us who still want to gawk at the cool regardless of its practicality, here is an assortment of 2009's most interesting interfaces.

In our yearly wrap-ups of the best products of 2009, we cannot but notice the shadow that falls over the editorial desk.

We are chilled and saddened by the ghosts of the past year - the apps that should have been, the startups that failed to launch, the brilliant ideas that were throttled, the great minds that were fired, the tech heroes that committed tragic gaffes. But some failures were so monumental that they require specific enumeration and commentary. Here are the 10 worst tech failures of 2009.

While Steve Jobs just told the New York Times' David Pogue that Apple isn't interested in creating a single-purpose eBook reader and that he doesn't think that eBooks are a big enough market right now, one eBook-like format has already made it into the iTunes store: a comic book. Tyrese Gibson's Mayhem! is now available, together with one song, as an iTunes LP album for $1.99 (iTunes link). Mayhem! was first released as a three-issue mini-series earlier last month.

Ever since Jeff Han demoed his Multi-Touch Workstation at the 2006 TED Conference, the world has been waiting for a high resolution sensory work experience. As a generation of hunched night creatures with intimate knowledge of our chiropractors, we've suffered and conformed to our traditional interfaces for too long. Touch was the future of workstations. But as articulated by ReadWriteWeb, the upcoming Apple tablet is not the workstation of the near future. It simply isn't practical. For those of us who still want to gawk at the cool regardless of its practicality, here is an assortment of 2009's most interesting interfaces.