When the iPhone was announced back in January 2007, I was vaguely interested but I didn’t immediately imagine I’d buy one.  I’d been using OS X Macs for a few years and had recently switched to a MacBook as my primary machine.  Like many other geeks I knew I’d also amassed an inexplicably large collection of iPods, so I was no stranger to Apple gear.  Apple’s pitch with the iPhone made sense in theory, but it was expensive and I had struggled with several smartphones over the preceding year and didn’t really believe the device category was particularly useful to me.  It wasn’t that smartphones hadn’t reached their potential yet in my estimation…it was that I thought they had.  And they just weren’t something I could bring myself to get too excited about.  I’d used earlier PDAs – both palms and PocketPCs going all the way back to the Cassiopeia.  They invariably collected dust after a few months.  I watched as several friends became deeply attached to their smartphones – mostly Blackberries and Treos – but I just didn’t get it.  They weren’t really that capable outside of messaging and at the time I didn’t text much and could damn well wait to read my email on a computer.  I’d always thought back when I was trying to make use of Windows Mobile PDAs “if only these things had ubiquitous connectivity, they’d start to be cool.”  But that’s exactly what I had been using for months when the iPhone was announced:  a 3g-capable Samsung Blackjack running WinMo 5.  It was not cool.  Apple came along and said, in effect, “All the important pieces are in place, but the software and UI suck.  That’s all that needs to be fixed (and of course we’ve fixed it).“  It didn’t seem like it could be that simple and I figured they’d make a very pretty, much better engineered version of my Blackjack.  Even after it had been announced and many of the particulars were known, I figured that’s basically what the iPhone was.

I ignored the original iPhone launch, but seeing as I genuinely despised my Blackjack I decided I’d go play with an iPhone at the Apple store after things settled down.  I went in about a week later.  In retrospect, I can’t even remember the specific aspects of using the iPhone that changed my mind when I actually sat down with one.  What I do remember is that it took about 5 minutes.  5 minutes after picking the thing up, I knew I was buying an iPhone.  I’d have bought one right there and then if the Apple store hadn’t sold out.  I went back early the next morning and threw my $600 down without hesitation.  Apple lowered the price so far, so fast as they worked out their initial strategy that they actually felt they had to give us early adopters a $100 idiot rebate, and yet, I distinctly remember feeling that I’d gotten every last penny’s worth of value from that phone within about a month.  As a gadget hound who’s ended up with buyer’s remorse more times than I care to remember, it was a rare and wonderful feeling.  :)

So what about the iPad?  It seems like déjà vu to me.  This time around, instead of replacing every smartphone I’ve ever hated, the iPad seeks to replace every netbook I’ve ever hated.  As with my pre-iPhone smartphone experience, I haven’t exactly used a lot of netbooks…but I’ve used enough to know I don’t like them.  Netbooks have all the basic limitations of the laptop form factor, sans most of the benefits of a real laptop.  The fundamental limitations of laptops are exaggerated in netbooks, in fact – they’re too small for a full-size keyboard or battery or reasonably sized screen, and too cheap to have a real CPU/GPU).  It’s gotta be a device category that’s ripe for getting run over by another Apple mega-hit…if the iPad really is to netbooks as the iPhone was to smartphones.  The analogy isn’t perfect, of course – the iPad really does represent a new device category, whereas the iPhone was clearly a smartphone, if a very good one.  The iPad won’t precisely replace anything you already own, which means it will either be of questionable utility or it will open up an entirely new class of computing you didn’t yet know you wanted to do, depending on who you talk to of course.  I don’t yet know for sure which it will be for me.  But I know I’m going to find out.

I’ll write a review of the iPad in a month or so…on my iPad, of course.