I won’t bother with predictions, and I don’t have the connections to tease; I’m going to make a wish/anti-prediction.

I want Apple’s mobile OS in an ebook form factor, with a screen roughly the size of a sheet of A5 (comparable to half a sheet of 8.5x11) or larger. I want it to have a great PDF reading application—something that can automatically zoom to eliminate large margins on the page—and an interface to a large ebook library, possibly through a partnership with Amazon.

I don’t think it will happen. The difference in size would make the interface different enough from that of the iPhone to require a substantial new engineering investment, and applications written for the iPhone wouldn’t work correctly. More importantly, an ebook reader would need to be much much stingier with power than the iPhone, and that probably means an e-ink display instead of an LCD. I don’t believe such displays have the responsiveness for motion graphics, and a touch-based interface without excellent visual feedback just wouldn’t work.

I’ll set the difficulty for my non-prediction at about 0.2, but if they do release such a device I’ll soon have a nice new toy to console me in my embarrassment.

Oh—and can we please have an external trackpad?