back to article iSlate leaves fingerprints all over the net

Apple's iSlate has been spotted online by Flurry Analytics, sporting an iPhone OS and consumerist tendencies. More than 50 instances of what Flurry calls "Apple's rumoured tablet device" have turned up in the company's records gleaned from application downloads, indicating that the device to be announced on Wednesday is iPhone …

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  1. LPF
    WTF?

    mmmmmmm

    Wow while getting back stats is one thing, using that informationt o spy on another company ?? I think they may have shot themselves in the foot here

    1. TeeCee Gold badge

      Shot in foot?

      Both barrels even.

      I'll bet that Apple's response to this will be to scan all apps on or submitted to the App Store for embedded Flurry code and ban all that have it.

      Having said that, the idea of Apple banning apps for sound commercial reasons that we can all understand is a bit odd though.

      1. Adam T

        Possibly deliberate

        Apple have the tools to see who your app is talking to, they like to use them in the approvals process - so either they were lax in this case, or decided it might make for good fuel to feed the hype engine. The announcement is only 2 days away, and they do love their build-ups.

  2. Jaques Croissant
    Thumb Down

    Err, one sec

    This "Flurry" thing sounds like spyware by any other name..

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Sounds more like Google Analytics

      you have got that blocked, I take it?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Yep

        Blacklisted in noscript.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    User Agent

    Most of these sites pick up the info from the user agent which is is very easy to change.

    If you check your logs appently I'm writing this on an islate

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Slate and Chalk

      ... and this was written on a Victorian_School_Slate. Only media type accepted is Chalk...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      re:User agent

      But if you were testing some new device as if you were an average consumer, would you be changing the settings for the user agent.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Enough already

    About the so**ing Islate/whatever.

    Who cares?

    1. Duncan Hothersall
      Thumb Up

      You won teh internets

      Just look how much you don't care! You went to the trouble of reading the article, clicking through to the comments and then posting! You've shown them alright. Nice one!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        I had to ventmy spleen somewhere.....

        ... and this article seemed a better place to do it than, say, an article on desktop vitualisation.

        Plus i didnt have read the whole article, the fact that it had islate clearly in the title allowed me to make a sound assumption that i could jump through to comments and whinge.

    2. Gulfie
      Troll

      You do?

      Well, lets face it, if you _really_ didn't care, you wouldn't have read the article and certainly wouldn't have posted a comment now, would you?

      BTW make sure you're indoors before daylight, wouldn't want you turning to stone now, would we?

      1. James Hughes 1

        Er...

        Surely the poster would be quite capable of seeing the title, realising its about some Apple iTablet thing, then going directly to the comments section and commenting as he/she did without reading it? The caring part comes from caring about NOT have yet another article, he surely doesn't care about the iBrick itself. Hence the post. Seems fair enough to me.

        Although he may still be a troll, your argument that he cares enough to comment is fallacious.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Down

      Don't click if you don't care

      If you don't care and you've had enough already why are you reading the article, let alone responding?????

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      wah wah wah

      You obviously care, Sunny Jim, or you wouldn't have bothered to leave a comment.

      The smart money is on it being named 'Canvas' btw. You read it here first.

      1. PogonaV

        O'rly

        I really don't think they'd f*ck up the name that badly.

        1. jai

          not iSlate

          all the evidence currently points towards the name being iPad - which makes sense, keeps it inline with the 'Pod and the 'Phone

    5. Steve Button Silver badge
      Megaphone

      Who cares?

      Who cares? WHO CARES?

      I do.

    6. Dr Richard

      "Who cares?"

      Quite a few people do, so there.

      I've been longing for a portable, easy to use, always-on, always-connected, slate-like (ST:NG) device for years .. this is the closest I've seen (okay rumoured) in the last 30 years that resembles it.

      However, as with all hype and rumours I'm prepared to be disappointed (valley of disappointment?) because of some possible limitation (too expensive or tied to crap carrier etc). But like ~900 people in Derbyshire, I live in Hope.

      1. Andrew James

        also

        There's also a small number of people who live in Hope somewhere on the edge of Wrexham / Flintshire. Live in Hope, die in Caergwerle is apparently an oft used local saying.

  5. Elmer Phud
    Coat

    iPhone apps

    Great -- it's not as if some drivers using TwatNav look out of the windcreen much - now they'll be completely blocking the view with an iSlate and ToMTom app.

    At least when they turn up half an hour after they should have all they need to say is 'I's late'

    Gone for coat

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      "TwatNav"

      You sir are a genius! Well done!

      Now I need to find the screen cleaners to get the half-eaten lunch off my screen!

  6. Peter Ford

    What's really surprising about this...

    ... is that Apple are actually testing the device.

    I thought they left that to the fanbois who buy their stuff...

  7. richard 69
    Stop

    as an apple fan...

    i am sick of hearing about this device. i hope they release nothing apart from an iphone os update then the 'analysts' can crawl back under their rocks.....

    if they do release, it must have some killer feature or it will end up in the back room next to the g4 cube....tablet, shmablet.....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      God no don't pray for that.

      If they don't announce a tablet we'll have to put up with months more of El Reg posting made up stuff about it every other day.

  8. iMlite
    Jobs Halo

    Apple games machine?

    We need a bigger pic of the stats El Reg!!!

    Games, entertainment, news and books, lifestyle, utilities, music, etc.

    So, we can say from these cherry picked google style stats that games, entertainment, and news and books are the main focus of the testers! As expected, the iSlate seems to offer increased capacity over the iPhone, where the iPhone falls down on hardware.

    Its a giant iPhone!

    Awaiting Wednesday and the release - should lead to blog and media overload for the next week - with orgasmic fanboys and rabid detractors!

    1. Elmer Phud

      HALLO!

      Yup, I now see Dom Joly not as an annoying bloke who plays pranks on the public but a foreteller of time to come.

      If you thought the current iPhone was a pain . . .

  9. John Styles

    I wish people wouldn't use that word

    When ever I see the word 'flurry' my brain parses it as 'furry'.

  10. Critical

    Bizarre conclusion to draw...

    "50 instances of tablet devices have been spotted downloading more than 200 applications, with the emphasis on games and media consumption rather than business apps"

    Might it be more the case that software including this "Flurry" crap is more likely to be a game / media app than anything else? A more "serious" company probably wouldn't entertain the idea of spying on their users...

    1. jai

      this

      +1

      i suspect you've hit the nail on the head right there

      added to which, games and media apps are going to be the most graphically intensive and challenging apps - and also the ones that are mostly to be written using the developers custom classes instead of those provided by the SDK. and so are most likely to break on a higher resolution, and also best placed to stress test the new hardware

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Down

      sounds about right

      This "Flurry" crap sounds dodgy as hell.. any authoritative list of apps that have it, so that they can be un-installed/removed?

  11. Andrew James

    well...

    At least this could almost be classed as news. Its the nearest thing to a new angle on this thing, real or otherwise, that i have seen for a few weeks.

    Wonder if Flurry have considered that maybe someone in house has manually adjusted a random selection of iPhone database rows to cause a stir at the weekly meeting.

  12. nobby
    Coat

    wouldn't it be funny

    if the iSlate is released on time?

  13. Haku

    iSpeculation

    should be the proper name of this alleged new thing from Apple, everyone's got their own theory on what shiny new object Steve Jobs will present to the world, which millions of people will lap up (some only to say they have the latest Apple gadget).

    I hope he doesn't do the envelope thing again...

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just hoping

    That you can hold it to your head like a giant iPhone, I miss the silly "sidetalking" websites making fun of the execrable n-gage.

    Yeah, I am going to be glad when all the speculation is over- though I do like shiny gadgets, and am not necessarily anti-Apple or anti the idea of new toys, if it doesnae suck.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Grenade

    Posture

    Will iSlate (iChalk, iPad, iTablet, iCommandment) users be stood standing holding it in the crook of their arm like a clipboard (sans big over-sized bulldog clip) ? Would it be justifiable assault to hit someone over the head if they held their i<PR term> device in such as fashion?

    I predict another Apple failure c.f. the Newton and Cube PowerPC's. But as Bill Buxton says, Apple do best when they learn from their failures ....

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Yeah, man, like who cares, damn it all!

    Bah, I don't care, I'm not a geek at all. I hate gadgets, I hate technology, I'm a luddite, all Mac fanboi's should be flogged!

    I'm a whinging whiney pom, I always look on the worst side of everything, I always find problems rather than solutions. Who cares about this stupid iSlate Tablet crap, it's crap just like the stupid iPhone I can't afford that my mates would shove in my face if I had any, but I don't, because I just bitch bitch bitch.

    I'm so tired of all this hype over just another stupid silly Apple product. I'm a linux closet geek, I like my stuff to break all the time, requiring me to hack away at it using my happy hacker keyboard via my serial interface just to make life more difficult, so I can whinge and moan a bit more.

    Apple is just a big bunch of marketing crap, Steve Jobs is a big mouth, their products are just overhyped and overpriced, which is why millions of fanboi idiots flock like fools to the shiny temple of cool.

    I hate myself, I hate gadgets, I'm a British geek, I hate success, I hate people who succeed, I hope this iSlate crap fails.

    I want my gadgets to be DIFFICULT dammit, I want to open them up and poke them and make them do things they shouldn't, but that damn Apple company won't let me - how dare they, I paid for it, It's MINE dammit. I want to jailbreak my damn toaster, just so I can see if it can do Waffles, I'm an inventor luddite whinging pommie mac hating hamster shunting fool.

    Damn it all!

    ... ad nauseum...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      G'day Bruce

      Yeah, shame about the Ashes wasn't it? Still, it's only a game.

    2. Nic 3
      Thumb Up

      Quality

      Love it. You just nailed about a 3rd of the Reg commenters.

      I love gadgets and I can afford them so I buy them. What an arsehole I am.

  17. J 3
    Coat

    Big iPhone?

    Hm, will they allow multitasking this time?

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    iSlab

    I'll be interested to see if it lives up to the hype and is worth the (quite probably extortionate) money they'll want for it.

    If it's nothing better than a jazzed up netbook for a stack o' cash then it'll be pretty hard for me to part with the green stuff.

    That said, bound to be a fair few that get it for a) its an apple b) it's new so must have it, end of, and c) ooooooo SHINY reasons.

    I don't own an iPhone as een though they are nice toys, personally I don't think they are quite there yet (for me, can't speak for the rest of you lot). Maybe iSlab will get me??

  19. StevieB
    Happy

    My 2c

    Me, me, me I know!!!!!

    I think :- a giant 10 inch iPod touch with 256Gb of flash, a little stand to prop it up on a desk, iPhone Os with a shared application storage area, something like AirSharing Pro to put that on a network as a WebDav disk, iPhonied versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote and lots and lots of Bluetooth to hook up with the existing wireless keyboard and Magic mouse (which I reckon with access to its secret workings could function a a standalone multitouch trackpad). At least that's what I want.

  20. starrigavan
    WTF?

    Another Apple Failure?

    So this new Apple device will go the way of the Cube and the Newton? But not the way of the iPhone, iPod, PowerBook, or any of the numerous versions of the iMac? Why not wait and see? It's only a few days away. If you think somebody is an idiot because he says he'll buy the i-thingie without it even having been announced yet, just remember, he thinks you're an idiot for saying you won't. And you're both right.

    1. Dr Richard
      Thumb Up

      I have a secondhand newton and secondhand cube ...

      Both still great products .. the Cube is still alive in use as a 17" design workstation for my wife.

      The newton had potential .. even the handwriting recognition got much better .. it just got beat by a cheaper, simpler version in the Palm Pilot (also have 2 variants of those .. Palm lost their way after the "V" [5]).

  21. Sandtreader

    I bought a Newton...

    ... and then realised that it wouldn't fit in my jacket pocket, the add-on keyboard thing was horrible, and nothing I wanted to do (e.g. decent text editor, C compiler, vector drawing program) would run on it like a proper laptop (I was also almost the only person that bought the Acorn laptop, which was great, for the time).

    I'm yet to be convinced that the middle way between phone and laptop is actually a product anyone really needs, but it'll be interesting to see if they can convince me a second time. <cue: Trick Me, Kelis>

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