The biography of the late Steve Jobs, titled simply Steve Jobs, is due to hit bookstores officially on Monday. But a lot of the book"s contents have already been leaked out in the press. We"ve already reported that the book mentions Jobs" contempt for Google, especially for its Android operating system. Now comes word that the biography may have confirmed what has been rumored to be in the works for some time.
The Washington Post reports that in one part of the book, Jobs talked about creating a new kind of television set. In interviews with the biography"s author Walter Isaacson before Jobs died earlier this month, Jobs is quoted as saying, "I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud ... It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it."
This sounds like less of a dream and more of a concrete plan to change the face of watching TV, much how like the iPod changed how we listen and buy music and how the iPhone has changed how we communicate via a wireless phone.
There"s no word yet on when such an Apple-branded television might be released, but the book"s quotes from Jobs would seem to imply that it is in some kind of advanced stage of development. We have seen these kind of projects before. Remember Microsoft and WebTV? More recently Google has pushed on with its Google TV project without a lot of success.
Yet we see more and more TV makers adding WiFi support into new TV sets and adding support for Internet apps. It"s pretty clumsy integration for the most part. Perhaps Jobs" idea will be the one to make such a television attractive to buyers.