9to5 Staff

US-bound travelers face a tough choice following the alleged attempt by a Nigerian millionaire terrorist to blow up a plane flying 278 passengers from Amsterdam to Detroit on Saturday – it seems they

As Apple tablet rumours drove company stock to new highs across the Christmas period, another small slice of information has emerged, suggesting the company does indeed hold plans to extend its application provision into the Cloud.

(As if they were done with the critically acclaimed current online version that is years behind Google Apps)

An Apple job posting this week reveals the company to be looking for an engineer to

More sleuthing being done by the bloggers:  This time Fscklog finds ‘magic slate’ is also registered to the same front company as iSlate.com.  As Macrumors notes, this would make a good name for a portable trackpad.  

MR also found a ‘smoking gun’ on the iSlate trademark.  Regina Porter, presumabley the same one that works in Apple Trademarking, was doing paperwork on the Slates as part of Slate Computing, LLC as recently as August of this year.  That means Apple is still interested in this name.

We’re still not sold on the name (like you, our readers, it appears) iSlate.  The original timing could have indicated it was a Plan B for the original iPhone but it’s seeming more and more like iSlate will be the name of the tablet and Magic Slate the name for a portable trackpad for desktops. 

For better or worse. 

Oh, you might want to sell your Wacom stock now.

Aggressive pricing might have helped turned ‘wishes’ into ‘gifts’ this year at Amazon.  Specifically, Amazon’s most wished for laptops and MP3 players a month ago have now turned into the most gifted MacBooks and iPods according to PED at CNN Money.

A look at the most gifted MP3 players is staggering.  iPods own the category with the only non-iPod product or accessory in the top 25 is the 32GB Zune which comes in 24th.

In laptops, MacBooks were three of the top five and took the first two spots.

In slightly related news (and helped by tablet rumors), Apple closed at an all time high — over 209 yesterday.

Merry Christmas.

We’re going to take this one from Macrumors and Applerejectedme.com at face value.  Apple registered iSlate.com through their third party domain registration/hiding service Markmonitor.com in 2007 when it likely purchased the domain from a company called Eurobox. There were a few weeks in 2007 when Apple was the domain holder. 

Remember, Bill Keller, Executive Editor for the New York Times, let slip (At 8:33 in the following clip) that:

“I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate...”

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7166514&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1

Techcrunch does some more investigation on ‘iSlate’ domains and finds out that Apple likely registered these all over Europe in 2006. It would seem that Slate or iSlate would be the frontrunner in choices for the new Apple tablet at this point, though lots of things could have changed between now and 2007.  Interestingly, this was about the time that Apple unveilled the iPhone.

Update: a commenter Luis Alejandro Masanti remarks correctly that the timing of these registrations coincides with Apple’s legal wranglings with Cisco over the ‘iPhone’ trademark and could have been a fallback name for the iPhone as well.

Look, we know there is a “Ain’t nuthin wrong with Safari” crowd out there who isn’t interested in other browsers like Firefox, Chrome and now Opera.  That’s OK, just head over to the next story.

For those who are interested, Opera has an Alpha release of their new Javascript Engine, Caraken, that is damn fast on slower connections (like the Mifi here at the parents’ vacation house).  Lifehacker ran some tests and it clobbered everying out there on Javascript tests, sometimes doubling or

tripling the performance of Chrome. 

I’m using Gmail which seems faster on Opera than either Chrome or Safari but can’t vouch for any of these tests personally.

Download it for Mac here.  Again, please remember that this is an unstable development build. There are known bugs, unimplemented UI elements and surprise crashes.

It also has some nice pre-caching features for slow connections that are help the holiday work go by a bit easier…

Apple boss Steve Jobs took home his usual one dollar salary in 2009, though the value of his stake in the company climbed to $1.1 billion.

Jobs is famed for not taking the kind of perks pocketed by many other CEOs, though the Gulfstream V jet he was given by the company in 1999 always wins a mention. 2009 saw Jobs take just $4,000 reimbursement for company-related travel on that jet. (He was reimbursed $871,000 in 2008).

The company co-founder holds 5.5 million shares in Apple. He has not sold any shares since his return to the company in 1997, and has not been granted any new shares since 2003.

Jobs is also the largest individual shareholder of The Walt Disney Co. His 7.4 percent stake is currently worth about $4.5 billion.

Apple will hold its annual shareholder meeting on February 25, during which votes will be taken on executive compensation and on two green proposals: one for a detailed environmental sustainability report, and the other for a board committee devoted to that issue.

It’s hard to remember any time where so many tablet rumors were flying so furiously.  The NY Times steps in this evening with their take.  While mostly a rehash, they do drop a hint that there might be some new, unexpected type of interaction to this tablet.   According to their source, a recently departed Apple employee, 

If the Financial Times is right, we might have only one month to wait until “Tablet Tuesday”.  They report:

Apple has something big up its sleeve for next month.  The company has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for several days in late January, according to people familiar with the plans.  Apple is expected to use the venue to make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th. Both YBCA and Apple declined to comment.

Remember, Apple turned down Macworld Expo 2010 which is usually scheduled for a week or so before this event.  Instead, Macworld moved to February.  This event would be sandwiched in between CES in January and Macworld. 

According to the Yerba Buena calendar, the dates of the 25, 26 and 27th of January are open.

This date would also roughly coincide with iLounge’s prediction from earlier this year.

If Apple does announce the tablet next month, it will likely be at least few months longer before you can get your grubby hands on one.  It will also be better than whatever you are getting for Christmas.

According to Silicon Alley Insider, Apple has asked a few select developers to ready a full screen mode of their apps for a demo next month. Obviously, with all of the tablet chatter and specifically the Financial Times’ report yesterday (and iLounge’s earlier report) of a January announcement, it would seem to indicate this would be for a tablet announcement, though an AppleTV update could also be a recipient of a full screen app update.

Meanwhile, everyone’s favorite Piper Analyst Gene Munster is giving 75% odds on a January announcement and 50% odds on a Tablet.  He also lays out the following:

• If the tablet were announced in January, he would expect it to ship some time in Apple’s second fiscal quarter. “Based on a conversation this week with a Taiwanese component supplier,” he writes, “we expect Apple to ship a tablet device by the end March.”
• Munster had previously estimated a monthly run rate of 162,000 units once the table ships (about 2 million annually). “Assuming the tablet comes out in [March],” he writes, “we believe Apple would sell around 1.4 [million] units at a $600 ASP in [calendar year 2010], an increase of about 2% to revenue.”
• Other reasons for a January event: to launch a new iPod touch with a video camera, or a new Apple TV that could support a subscription TV service

Quoth the Munster:

“We expect the tablet hardware to be similar to an iPod touch but larger (about 10″); we expect the key differentiator of the device to be its software. While there are several options ranging from a touch screen Mac OS X to an iPhone-like OS, we expect the tablet to be driven by a new version of Apple’s iPhone OS that runs a new category of larger apps alongside all the current apps from the App Store. We believe Apple’s tablet would compete well in the netbook category even though it would not be a netbook. Rather it would focus more on apps, entertainment content (from the iTunes Store), and web surfing.”

And to round it all up, the BGR is saying that the January announcement of the tablet will definitely be a 7-incher, not just the 10-incher we’ve heard so so much about.