So far, the known hardware seems to be: a 3.7″ capacitive high-res (guessing 854×480) screen, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 256MB RAM / 512MB ROM, a 16GB microSD card, 5MP camera, and the usual assortment of radios: bluetooth, wifi, etc.

Update 1/3: The Nexus One actually has 512MB of RAM and a 4GB (upgradeable to 32GB) MicroSD Card.

While this may be one of the first Snapdragon phones to hit the market, what’s more interesting is way Google is supposedly selling it. The Google Phone will be available directly from Google as an unlocked GSM phone, which isn’t usually done here in the U.S.

Google also has an interesting opportunity here since they’ve recently aquired Gimzo5, which already had an SIP (calls over wifi) solution for Android. Combine this with Google Voice and you’ve got a cell phone that doesn’t need ANY kind of service plan, assuming you’ve got wifi wherever you are. You, of course, would be able to add a GSM data or voice plan (T-Mobile has some nice ones for people that provide their own phone) or even a cheap prepaid SIM card for emergencies. What will be interesting to see is if carriers allow you to purchase a data-only plan if something like this were to happen, as they’ll certainly be unhappy about no longer being able to nickel and dime their customers for each and every service.

So imagine this: rather than paying countless fees each month, you just get a simple data plan, which all the services on your phone are able to make use of. Imagine paying $59.99/mo (current standard rate for cell 3G cards) for unlimited Voice/SMS/Data/Nav/etc. And, if you’re not being tied in with long-term contracts, competition between carriers could bring that price down further.

One problem with this is our tendency to only look at up-front costs. I know at least a few people that either picked up (or seriously considered) the iPhone 3G when it dropped to $99, but these people fail to realize that the upfront cost of a phone is trivial compared to the cost of the plan they’ll lock you into. Consider that $99 iPhone. The bare minimum plan you can get away with is $69.99/mo (close to the cost of the device), or $1679.76 over the course of the two year contract (which is why I tell anyone looking at the $99 iPhone to pay the extra $100 for the 3GS). If you want unlimited messaging (they’re $0.20 for a text or $0.30 for a media message otherwise) that’s another $20.00/mo or $480 over two years. GPS Navigation? Sure, but it’s another $9.99/mo ($239.76). Assuming you want all these features? $2399.52 over two years. Assuming you never go over your monthly minutes, but don’t worry, we can up to unlimited minutes and bring the plan up to $159.98/mo, so you’d be paying a little over 1.5 times the cost of the device each month just to use it, and $3839.52 over the life time of your “cheap” $99 iPhone.

So, consider the alternative: Buy a phone upfront at full cost, let’s say $600 (probably more than it would be). As long as you have wifi, you wouldn’t even need a plan, but let’s assume your phone does need data, so you pick up a $59.99/mo data plan sans-contract. Over two years that’s $1439.76 for unlimited use. So, over two years, the $99 iPhone cost you $3938.52 and the $600 Google Phone costs you $2039.76. So, a 6x upfront cost leads to an overall cost of about half.

Right now this is little more than an idle daydream for me, but Google already lets you do SMS and Navigation using the phone’s data connection for free, and with a recent VoIP acquisition under their belts, which could be made to play nicely with Google Voice, maybe we’ll see something like this come along.

First, the “netbook” rumor, which is that this would be Apple’s first Atom-based PC.  Considering that OS X seems to run decently on hacked netbooks, and that Snow Leopard is supposedly more lightweight than Leopard, I can see this happening, with hardware along the lines of:

• 10″ 1024×600 Multitouch LED display
• Intel Atom N280 1.66GHz
• 2GB DDR2-800 Memory
• Nvidia Ion Geforce 9300M
• 32GB Flash Storage

Of course, there are some possible tweaks, mostly in the CPU.  It’s possible that they might wait for the Pineview Atom chip, the N450. While it’s the same clock speed, it does support x86_64 extensions, and given Apple’s recent push towards 64 bit with Snow Leopard, I could see them doing this (Remember, this likely isn’t coming in the immediate future). The other route they could use is going with the nettop version of Pineview, specifically the D510, which buys them both dual core and hyper-threading, but at the cost of more energy use (also even the nettop Atoms use less energy than mobile Core 2 processors). Again, with Snow Leopard’s supposed improvements in multi-threading, this would make sense.

Even if they went with Pineview, I’m guessing they’d ignore the chip’s onboard GMA 500 in favor of something from Nvidia, likely their Ion solution (which can be either a Geforce 9300M or 9400M), as the GMA 500 probably wouldn’t do OS X justice, and also taking into account that they moved all of their products off of Intel GMA graphics earlier this year.

Finally, I imagine that any kind of Mac Tablet would have some sort of flash storage, likely similar to what we have in the iPhone/iPod Touch.  While it’s not necessarily going to be much faster than a hard drive, it will help in power consumption and noise.

A second possibility is a “beefier” tablet, using components found in notebooks rather than netbooks:

• 12″ 1280×800 Multitouch LED display
• Intel Core 2 Duo ULV 1.6GHz
• 2GB DDR3-1066 Memory
• Nvidia Geforce 9400M
• 64GB Flash Storage

This model’s hardware is similar to what’s available in the Macbook Air: A low-voltage Intel chip, DDR3 Memory, and a Geforce 9400M.  I’ve left this using flash storage, as I think the goal here should be no moving parts, and using a solid state drive would bring the price up too much.  Of course, you can mix and match from either of these two lists, really, they’re just two examples of what Apple could potentially do.

In terms of ports, I imagine either configuration would have a MagSafe power adapter, two USB 2.0 ports, a headphone jack, and (possibly) a Mini DisplayPort output.  Airport Extreme and Bluetooth 2.1 are a given, but I doubt either model would feature an optical drive (though a USB one would definitely be an option).

Finally, pricing: As they’re configured above (and I’m probably dreaming here), I’d like to see $799 and $999, respectively.  The first number is probably more on the mark than the second, as Atom parts are fairly cheap.  The most expensive part of the laptop would likely be the display.  The second machine is probably under priced, and a $1199 price tag might be more likely, but that still undercuts the Fujitsu by $800.

And now for how Apple can completely screw this up. One of the rumors floating around on the internet is that Apple’s Tablet will be a 10″ iPod Touch, which would be quite the disaster.  For starters, I’m guessing a majority of the apps in the App Store would need rewriting to support multiple resolutions (unless Apple made the even more laughable decision of releasing a 10″ device with a 320×480 resolution display). The other option being a separate App Store for the tablet.  Even then, a 10″ iPod Touch wouldn’t really offer anything that the current models don’t.  The primary appeal of the device is having quick access to information and the internet in your pocket.  Not only would hauling around a 10″ version be more cumbersome, but at the size of a netbook, an operating system as locked down at the iPhone OS is just laughable, not to mention that you’d be paying a lot more for the privilege of running one app at a time (sure, they might remove this restriction on a larger and more powerful model, but I wouldn’t say it’s a sure thing).

While undercutting Fujitsu’s slate tablets is easy (they basically have no competition right now, which is one of the reasons their prices are so high, a big iPod is in a completely different market and is instead competing with other internet tablets which aren’t running full featured operating systems, and these devices are priced well under $2000. While there aren’t many (if any, unless you count the Kindle DX) devices in that size range, there’s likely a reason for that.  A device that big should have more functionality than a netbook.

Assuming that Apple makes the smart choice here, and they do it soon, I’ll probably be picking it up on day one.  The only thing left is what would it look like? While they were way off on the date, I think Gizmodo did a really nice job on their mockup, as well as guessing what it would probably be called.

I’ve been listening to This Week In Tech a lot recently, and one of the advertisers was a hosting company called Squarespace.  TWIT has a pretty good record (In my book, at least) of picking good advertisers, so I decided to give their free trial a go, and that’s what I’m typing this in now.

While I haven’t been using it long enough to make an informed judgement, my first impressions have been very positive.  Squarespace provides a nice AJAX WYSIWYG editor, and your entire site is easily customizable by dragging and dropping different elements.  Several layouts, each with a few different styles are available and easily switched between, and each theme can then be tweaked manually in the editor or by modifying the raw CSS file.

I also can’t comment on the speed of uploads and downloads as the trial account doesn’t give you any storage space to work with, but it stands to reason that as a hosting company, the speeds should be plenty good enough for me (managing my site is certainly snappy enough).

At this point, I’m pretty much sold on it, and will probably be using this as my primary blog for the future.  I’m planning on starting fresh, leaving my old site in read-only mode for archival purposes, and only hosting new content here.