Brian and I get more excited about the Apple Tablet with each advancing day.  And it isn’t just because of the possibility of of watching t.v. and reading the New York Times on the device.  There are plenty of devices out there that would let us do that right now.  What we’re really excited about is the potential to finally have a solution for keeping all of our guitar tablature handy.  Last year, we wrote an article describing our hope that the Amazon Kindle would be the solution.  But it wasn’t.  Read on to see why not and why we think the Apple Tablet will be different.

For starters, tabs looked terrible on the screen because of its low resolution (which would have killed it right there), but there was another problem. None of the many legal digital sources for tablature launched an application to enable you to buy tabs on the kindle (or to even get them on the device for that matter).  In combination, this meant that the Amazon Kindle wouldn’t be the solution we were hoping for.  But we have higher hopes for Apple’s upcoming tablet.

1.  The Source.  The device is being manufactured and marketed by Apple.  We have tremendous faith in the company that brought us the iPod and the iPhone.

2.  The Display.  Unlike Amazon’s colorless reading device, the Apple tablet will have a color screen and it is widely expected to be a larger version of the glorious color screen on the iPhone (the rumor is at least 7 inches diagonally).  How do we know that a color Apple screen will work well for tablature?  Because we have seen it in use on the Tab Toolkit iPhone application and it looks glorious.

3.  The iTunes Store.  Sure, you can buy books, blogs and newspaper subscriptions (like the New York Times) on the Kindle, but the Kindle store doesn’t have anywhere near the audience that the the iTunes Store has (8.5 billion songs sold since launch).  In short, Apple knows how to get publishers to sell stuff on their devices and sell stuff in huge numbers.

4.  Guitarist User Base.  A lot of publishers are already publishing iPhone Applications for guitarists.  Apple has also developed a few guitar training videos and made them available in its GarageBand application.  Apple already has a lot of guitarists using its stuff and marketing a guitar tablature solution to these users would be a logical next step.

The big question is how the existing digital tablature sellers will make out in all this.  Our suggestion would be that they get on the bandwagon early and develop applications for this device.  The Apple Tablet could finally allow guitar tablature to go legit.

Would you buy guitar tablature for a portable electronic device?  Let us know in the comments.