At the moment, Apple’s (AAPL) tablet is not a real product but a gumbo of rumor, speculation, patent diving, and unabashed daydreaming. But it’s already inspiring a thoughtful backlash.

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I continue to think of my iPhone not as a phone but as a personal computer. Which is why I continue to be so nonplussed about Apple’s (AAPL) barring of some applications on the grounds that they compete with its own apps, and others at (reportedly) the behest of AT&T (T).

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About the only thing we know for sure about Apple’s (AAPL) allegedly upcoming tablet computer is that there’s definitely misinformation floating around at the moment. Last week, AppleInsider was exceptionally confident that Apple will be shipping its long-awaited tablet computer in the first quarter of next year.

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After a few months of lagging sales, market researcher NPD Group is finally saying the recession caught up with the video games industry. All it took was for gaming to suffer its biggest year-over-year sales drop in 9 years.

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In theory, software version numbers should be about as scintillating as as serial numbers, house numbers, channel numbers, or Vehicle Identification Numbers. You don’t much more mundane than the practice of keeping track of a software package’s major and minor editions by assigning decimal numbers to them. Except…version numbers long ago stopped being version numbers.

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If you ask Apple (AAPL) or AT&T (T) how much the iPhone 3G S costs, they’ll emphasize two prices: $199 for the 16GB version and $299 for the 32GB one, as Apple does here. It’s only in the fine print and disclaimers that they’ll explain that only new customers and those who aren’t on a contract (or nearing the end of one, at least) qualify for those deals.

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Poor Twitter! It may be the hottest service on the Web, but it’s also profoundly misunderstood. Lots of people cheerfully admit they don’t get it. Others emphatically believe things about it that aren’t true.

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As I said in my post last Sunday on Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunter” ads, it’s unrealistic to expect TV commercials to contribute to a thoughtful discussion of anything. An exercise in comparison shopping between Windows and PCs that takes place in a sixty-second Microsoft (MSFT) commercial just isn’t going to be fair and balanced, any more than an Apple (AAPL) commercial is going to explain that it’s possible to get respectable Windows laptops for a whole lot less than the cheapest Macs.

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There’s something about comparing the prices of Windows PCs and Macs that makes otherwise cool and collected people–Windows and Mac users alike–become profoundly emotional and partisan, until steam shoots out of their ears and their eyeballs turn bright red. You can see this passion crop up in some of the comments on Ed Oswald’s two recent posts on Microsoft’s new “Lauren” ad comparing 17-inch Windows laptops to the MacBook Pro.

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Old computer products, like old soldiers, never die. They stay on the market–even though they haven’t been updated in eons. Or their names get slapped on new products–available only outside the U.S. Or obsessive fans refuse to accept that they’re obsolete–long after the rest of the world has moved on.

For this story–which I hereby dedicate to Richard Lamparski, whose “Whatever Became of…?” books I loved as a kid–I checked in on the whereabouts of 25 famous technology products, dating back to the 1970s. Some are specific hardware and software classics; some are services that once had millions of subscribers; some are entire categories of stuff that were once omnipresent. I focused on items that remain extant–if “extant” means that they remain for sale, in one way or another–and didn’t address products that, while no longer blockbusters, retain a reasonably robust U.S. presence (such as AOL and WordPerfect).

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Last week, PCMag.com’s Sascha Segan pointed out something unusual about former Vice President Al Gore’s keynote speech at next week’s CTIA Wireless phone trade show in Las Vegas: It wasn’t going to be open to the press, apparently at the request of Gore or his staff. It was a truly jarring bit of news. I’ve been attending tech trade shows for a couple of decades, and can’t remember a single other keynote that the media wasn’t invited to attend.

But it’s not just as a courtesy that we press people are normally let into such speeches–media coverage is one of the primary reasons why they exist. It’s impossible, for instance, to imagine a scenario in which Steve Jobs keynotes at Macworld Expo or Bill Gates ones at CES were anything but publicity extravaganzas designed to attract as much media attention as possible.

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I’m an Early Adopter. I like to be among the first to try out new products and services. If you were looking for me on the Rogers Technology Adoption Lifecycle–the bell-shaped curve that’s a favorite of product managers–you’d find me on left side of the curve, just after the truly courageous Innovators but before the onset of the rabble of the Early Majority.

Being an early adopter means that sometimes I’ve been left in the lurch when a product or service I adopted early failed or was pulled inexplicably from the market. Were you also a user of Pownce, Yahoo Photos, or Google Notebook? Everything has a natural lifecycle, of course, and I have to expect that some of the products I (perhaps too eagerly) embraced will not survive.

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My favorite moment at this year’s Macworld Expo keynote had nothing to do with any of the products that were unveiled–it was was about the unveiling of a person.

At last year’s Macworld Expo keynote, Steve Jobs waxed rhapsodic about the Apple engineer who had gone on vacation to the Cayman Islands, shot video, and had trouble editing it–and who then invented the all-new, simpler iMovie as a result. He couldn’t have spoken more highly about the guy, but he never mentioned his name. I pinged an Apple (AAPL) contact to ask who this brilliant Apple employee was, and got a prompt and polite note back saying that they wouldn’t disclose his name.

After I wrote about this experience and said that I thought Apple should give its developers some glory–as it did in the early days of the Mac–I got an email from someone who said that the iMovie inventor was surely Randy Ubillos, one of the creators of Adobe (ADBE) Premiere.

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Wow. Wow. Wow. Over the last few days, folks noticed that the traditional announcement that Steve Jobs would kick off IDG’s Macworld Expo with a keynote speech hadn’t come yet, and began wondering if he might be a no-show–as unlikely as that seemed. Sometimes, the unlikely is nonetheless reality: Apple has announced that marketing head Phil Schiller will keynote, and that it’s pulling out of Macworld Expo altogether as of 2010.

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It’s one of the most popular phones in history. It’s also one of the most controversial. And it’s almost certainly inspired more news, reviews, analysis, and general punditry than any phone–maybe any other gadget–ever. But when all is said and done, the bottom line on the iPhone is simple: What do the people who use them every day think of their phones?

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