clipped from: news.cnet.com   

Apple seems almost ready to bridge the gap between the iPhone and the Macbook with a new type of mobile computer.

Is the world finally ready for the mobile minitablet?

It's become quite clear over the last several months that Apple is ready to bridge the mobile computing gap, with plans to develop a device that fits somewhere in between the iPhone and the MacBook.
Apple is developing a "media pad" that would let users watch videos on a larger screen than an iPod Touch or Amazon Kindle, but on a device that's more portable than notebooks and lacks a keyboard.
The personal computer industry has long tried to make such a device a reality

Apple's iPhone OS, however, was designed for a small-screen mobile environment. Installing the iPhone OS 3.0 on the iPad would allow Apple to preserve the user interface from the iPhone and iPod Touch and keep the device simple: a more complicated (and power-hungry) operating system isn't needed for a computer like this.