Apple iTV? Kinect TV? Get ready for a living-room brawl.

Earlier this fall, Walter Isaacson published a biography of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Among the most interesting tidbits in the book, from a tech perspective, was the revelation that Jobs, immediately prior to his death, was working on an Apple television, now colloquially called the iTV. 

"I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use," Jobs told Isaacson. "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." At the time, Bloomberg reported that the iTV launch was being overseen by Jeff Robbin, the same guy who helped build both the iPod and the iTunes store. 

Unsurprisingly, Apple issued no formal comment on the iTV. But according to the Guardian, the Apple iTV is very real, and possibly nearing production. In an article filed on Saturday, Julliete Garside writes that Sharp, the Japanese technology giant, will handle the displays on the new iTVs – caveat: iTV is a nickname coined in the blogosphere, and by no means a working title – and estimates that the device will hit in the "second half of 2012." 

Garside's chief source is Peter Misek, an analyst at Jefferies, a US investment bank. Not only does Misek believe the iTV is imminent, he also indicates that the rest of the market has begun to adjust accordingly. "Other TV manufacturers have begun a scrambling search to identify what iTV will be and do," Misek says. "They hope to avoid the fate of other industries and manufacturers who were caught flat-footed by Apple."

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