Strange Pic Of "Apple Device" Appears/Disappears On Japanese Site (With Pic, & Updated)

by , 12:00 PM EDT, May 31st, 2001

Update: The mystery has been solved. Observer Ahnyer Keester has pointed us to a product called the WebPad II Internet Appliance from Honeywell, which is clearly the product image that was modified to include the Apple logo below. We are leaving the original story as it was first published. You can check out the WebPad II's Web site for all the details on this device, including the original unaltered image.

We received a note from an anonymous Observer with some text and an image that reportedly came from a Japanese Web site. This comes squarely from the it-can't-be-real-but-we-wish-it-were files, but we thought it entertaining enough to share with you. What we have is an image of a slate-looking device with an Apple logo at the top that appeared along with a story that says it is a prototype being shown by Apple to NTT DoCoMo, an electronics manufacturer. According to our anonymous contributor, the image, the article, and the Web site itself disappeared shortly after it was first posted, and conspiracy theorists and Mac fans bored from waiting for MACWORLD New York alike are free to speculate that it was by order of Apple Japan. For the rest of us, here's the image and the translation of the story's text:

I managed to copy this from a Japanese Web site yesterday. It is gone now, as well as the site (was on GeoCities). The link from the Japanese site to the site that went down is also gone.

Japanese text read (something like this..)

Apple showed a new Internet device to NTT DoCoMo officials (iMode giant) two weeks ago. The device is like a portable tablet, but slides into a dock that has CD, keyboard, and other I/O, etc. A PC style card was also plugged in the device, an NTT PHS (PHS is similar to cellular) mobile card (top left). Buttons had nice blue glow (bottom right) wireless keyboard also shown, and the top right is a BLUETOOTH-based device. The side's are rugged plastic handles. The screen is a 15" LCD. The demo also included several of the devices using an AirPort base station to surf the web.

(I can't translate the rest of it.) Picture's background was removed to protect the guilty. :-) The article seems to say this is a new iMac when combined with "base dock," but my translation is rough.

Thanks to the anoymous person who stretched his Japanese translation skills to their utmost to bring us his translation.

The Mac Observer Spin:

We have published images of a few devices that looked awesome, but were fakes, and we think this is yet another. It's cool though, as are most of the fake Apple products on the Internet, and we would love to see the company bring something like this to market. Since Microsoft is working hard on a tablet PC, it does stand to reason that Apple will lead the way, but this probably isn't it. It is interesting that the link to the article and the article itself disappeared so quickly, but it was probably not from pressure from Apple.