It’s official! 27JAN10 Apple Computers will introduce the iPhone Gen4 and the theorized, much talked about Apple Tablet. While tablets have been around for just short of a decade, so too were cell phones before Apple put out the iPhone. So will tablet makers like HP and Asus finally be given a stylistic blue print for a form factor that the public buys uncontrolably?

Headlines and reading of the past few days indicate that it’s about to be a mad, mad cellular world in terms of technology that permeates our daily lives. On the more glib side, both Intel and Microsoft are advertising that our lives, decades ahead, are already under development. The iPhone is rumored to drop AT&T as the sole carrier. A little thing called Google Voice is/might be set to enter the mainstream? Windows Mobile’s newest release preview is nothing greater than disappointing and the Windows Phone, yup, that’s the name thusfar, is peaking out as one of the greatest buzzes online today only after barcodes. (!)

Those of us at Dinarius have long seen tablet shaped, touchscreen personal computers as the next step in what most users would prefer. Our darling was the Gateway M280. Despite the sense that tablets make, few folks bought in to it. The industry swallowed R&D on tablets and UMPC’s (another brilliant next step that went largely unadopted) and instead found a public ga-ga for smart phones.

See Gizmodo’s YouTube sneak of Microsoft’s kick-ass Courier and see HP’s already realized tablet that left the gate long before Apple.

I’m normally very happy to see the Wall Street Journal and NYTimes and Washington Post make it to the leaderboard of Techmeme.com where tech-news is filtered via secret algorithm to form a lovely (not perfect) Page A1 TECH Section but today, I totally disagree with the WSJ’s article: “Time To Leave The Laptop Behind”