Flurry Analtytics watching their iPhone/iPod analytics believes they have tracked Google employees testing the new Apple tablet on the Apple Cupertino campus running Apple iPhone OS 3.2. Leading people to speculate the the OS will be offered later this year.
They identified approximately 50 devices that match the characteristics of Apple's rumored tablet device. Flurry "placed" these devices geographically on Apple's Cupertino campus and have a fair level of confidence that we are observing a group of pre-release tablets in testing.
Testing of the Apple tablet device increased dramatically in January, with observed signs of life as early as October of last year. Apple appears to be going through its cycle of testing and polish, which is expected from any hardware or software company as it nears launch.
Apple is expected to announce the yet-to-be named hardware on Wednesday, January 27.
On these "tablet" devices, Flurry observed approximately 200 different applications in use by testers. Studying category trends provides insight into the kind of user Apple is targeting and how it expects the device to be used. Below is a chart that shows the number of applications in use by category across test devices.
The largest category was games. The tablet device clearly targets consumers. The mix of applications observed comprises mainly of media and entertainment consumption as opposed to enterprise, productivity and computing. Across all applications detected, there was a strong theme of sharing and/or social interaction including social games, social networking, photo sharing and utilities like file transfer applications.
A noteworthy observation is that the Apple hardware we detected was running on OS 3.2, which has not yet been released. Currently the iPhone and iPod Touch are running on OS 3.1.2.