There’s a lot of buzz in the iWorld today around Apple’s rumoured release of its iSlate, iTablet or whatever it’s likely to be called, has stimulated quite a few conversations. It’s being fuelled by the FT’s  scoop around the rental of a stage for few days later in January 2010.

The company has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for several days in late January, according to people familiar with the plans.

Apple is expected to use the venue to make a major product announcement on Tuesday, January 26th. Both YBCA and Apple declined to comment.

Blogs like Gizmodo have talked about the iSlate as being a big contender along with iPad and a few other variants with lots of speculation around a release date

The Wall Street Journal says the tablet is actually going to ship in March, and an analyst said it’s coming in March or April. iLounge says it’ll hit stores in May or June, like the iPhone. Digitimes reported Foxconn is supposed to have almost half a million of ‘em shipped by April. Little emperor of Apple analysts Gene Munster says the first half of 2010. A bunch of connected Mac people just say 2010.

TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters has an interesting write up and looks further into the whole whois shebang.

Nice scoop by MacRumors, which reportedly retrieved historical evidence that Apple has acquired the domain name islate.com back in 2007. Apparently, the Cupertino company registered the domain through brand protection firm Mark Monitor to conceal the fact that the domain name is theirs, as usual, but was briefly listed as the owner at some point in the past nonetheless.

He goes on the look at a few other tld’s and finds some interesting commonalities:

Other related domain names that were secured through Mark Monitor: islate.info and islate.biz, both of which were registered on the same date as islate.co.uk: 17 November 2006.

iSlate.fr and iSlate.jp are also managed by Mark Monitor, so it’s looking like iSlate might be the winner.

I looked up other contenders like ipad.co.uk, .com etc as well as  iTablet.co.uk, .com, appletablet.com and other variants and no commonalities of ownership were present.

Whatever it ends up being it’s a great boon for Apple and will no doubt stimulate a whole sub economy of domains, products and services aimed at supporting it! Exciting times for geeks!