Evidence Points to Tablets Now Being Tested Online By Apple

Posted by Editor on Jan 24, 2010 in Apple, Tablets

More in from the folks at Techcrunch. Potentially conclusive evidence that the tablet exists- testing hits of iPhone apps by a device and OS from Cupertino that does not match any existing iPhone or iPhone OS!

Flurry, a mobile app analytics company, has noticed approximately 50 devices in the Cupertino that match the characteristics of Apple’s tablet device. Flurry claims to have reliably placed these devices on Apple’s Cupertino campus, and are confident that they are “observing a group of pre-release tablets in testing.”

This make sense – as the Apple Tablet has to be tested before it is announced this Wednesday, January 27 in San Francisco. Furthermore, Flurry has been an extremely reliable source on analytics data thus far and don’t often break stories unless they are sure they’ve checked their facts.

They’ve noticed that a large number of the apps downloaded were Games (140 total downloads or launches) and the next group was Entertainment, followed by News and Books. Here’s a chart of the usage data:

A little bit of background, similar access log/ analytics reports have been used to detect other unannouced Apple products before. For example similar usage reports have detected an as yet unreleased version of the iPhone 3GS as reported by Pinch Media going back as far as 2008:

Recently, one of the users of Pinch Analytics noticed the string “iPhone 2,1″ appearing in their version reporting, and realized that if Apple stuck to its naming conventions, this might be the next version of the iPhone. At Pinch Media, we’ve seen this for some time now, and haven’t thought too much of it — even without this data, we’d just automatically assume Apple’s always working on new versions of their core products. But now that MacRumors and VentureBeat have picked up the story, here’s a little more information:

the first time an application using Pinch Analytics was run by a ‘iPhone 2,1′ device occurred back in early October 2008;
applications using Pinch Analytics were run by ‘iPhone 2,1′ devices very sporadically until mid-December 2008, when the pace picked up slightly;
to date, a few dozen distinct ‘iPhone 2,1′ devices have run almost two dozen different applications using Pinch Analytics;
when ‘iPhone 2,1′ devices run applications using Pinch Analytics’ optional geolocation tracking, they’re almost exclusively located in the south San Francisco Bay Area;
while most of the sessions have been made from wifi connections, there’s been a few connections over AT&T’s network, so presumably this device handles both;
the applications that have been run by Pinch Analytics don’t share much in common, except for their size — they’re among the larger applications to use our stuff, with hundreds of thousands to millions of unique users.

What’s interesting isn’t that the tablet has finally showed up in access logs which are near-instant in their data feedback- that was inevitable, but that Apple has managed to keep all of this development within their intranet for all these years.