In a rather unexpected twist, Canada's largest newspaper and newspaper of record -- The Globe and Mail -- has published details of Apple's upcoming iTV. According to the paper, Rogers and Bell -- Canada's two largest telcos -- are already testing the Apple iTV in their labs.
The Canadian paper, citing two anonymous sources(Opens in a new window), then confirms the feature set of iTV: Voice control via Siri integration; gesture recognition with a front-facing camera; and an on-screen keyboard, allowing users to surf the web, use social networks, start video chats, and so on. The Globe doesn't confirm that the iTV will be interoperable with the iPhone or iPad, but in our opinion that's a given.
In other news, over the weekend Best Buy issued a very short-lived customer survey(Opens in a new window) where it asked customers if it would be interested in a 42-inch "Apple HDTV" for $1,499. The survey confirmed that the iTV would effectively be a 42-inch iPad, with access to the App Store, media downloads through the iTunes Store, and iCloud integration. Best Buy has since issued a statement saying the survey was merely "hypothetical," but the specs do seem to line up with expectations. The price is excessive if you look at it from a TV point of view, but not when you consider that it has a full computer inside -- and possibly the upcoming A6 processor, too.
Ultimately, though, we all know that the Apple iTV will be awesome. These reports merely ratify our expectations -- if they did anything else, we'd be miffed. After a slew of almost infallible product launches, iTV has to be good.
The bigger shocker is that we seem to be living through a very rare example of Apple PR losing control of an unannounced product. Apple is famously tight-lipped when it comes to new products, usually managing to secure complete secrecy until the keynote itself.
