Rumours about the forthcoming Apple tablet devices have been heating up for several months now and it looks like the company is preparing a new kind of devices. It now transpired that Apple owns iSlate.com domain name, which may mean that the name of the forthcoming product is iSlate.

At the moment it is not certain that Apple is preparing to release a tablet device in January, moreover, the name of the product is naturally not known. However, MacRumours web-site has discovered that Apple registered iSlate domain name back in 2007, which may be an indicator that the company has plans to release a product or service called “iSlate”.

At press time Apple did not appear to have registered iSlate trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Earlier this year two images published by a web-site showed off a touch-screen-based MID with Apple Mac OS X Leopard welcome screen. The device features “Home” button on the lower side of the unit and has a screen with approximately 8” – 10” in diagonal. The product seems to be rather thin, which may point to the usage of a very ultra low voltage processor, perhaps, an ARM-based one, or a special version of Intel Atom.

Apple did not comment on the news-story.

Tags: Apple, iSlate, Macintosh