Five years later, people go crazy about the one Apple product that I wanted all along

By the time I even have enough time to finish this, every single pundit on the planet has weighed in on the iPad, so I’ll spare you a re-hash of it all (from features to all the Flash-related idiocy) and say simply that I will be getting one given the mileage I’ve gotten off my iPod Touch alone.

I bought that despite my reservations regarding first generation Apple products and it ended up being the first device I reach for every morning for a number of purposes, including drafting this site’s posts, so I fully expect the iPad to become my main device as far as the written word is concerned – and by that I mean handling e-mail, reading news, books¹ and, of course, drafting essays².

But there’s more – I wouldn’t be too surprised to find myself using it for note-taking at meetings as well, since (get this) it is the closest thing ever to what I outlined five years ago as being my perfect PDA. Although I couldn’t envision touchscreen keyboards becoming this good at that time, all of the minimum requirements I had five years ago are there (well, at least the ones that keep making sense to me), and then some.

And the best bit is that it’s only the beginning.

Apple isn’t going to let something this disruptive stand as is: it’s going to be as much of a moving target as the original iPod, and we’ll have a few fun years watching it evolve – a lesson most of the reporting I’ve read so far just keeps on missing.

Thanks, Steve.

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¹ I sure as hell hope that I can import my existing EPUB library onto it without any shenanigans, though.

² I am already looking at the Pages file format to build a simple Pages to Textile converter, and so far it’s working out OK – more on that if I ever find the time, for big changes are afoot.