Sure I'm a Mac guy, I have been for years. When the iPhone was introduced, I would have rushed out and bought one immediately except for the fact that Cingular/AT&T wouldn't sell me one because of my corporate cellular account. I was told, at the time, that the iPhone was not ready to be used in a corporate environment because it was incapable of connecting to anything other than Apple.com email.

Frustrated and impatient I waited. Thankfully, I waited long enough to find out that the first generation iPhone was a pretty sad little device. I decided to wait until the iPhone was upgraded, which as it turns out, wasn’t a very long wait.

I discarded my Blackberry Curve 8310 and bought an iPhone 3G 16GB that would do everything I wanted, or so I thought. At first I was very pleased with the shiny slick device, and it seemed to work well enough. However after a year of life with this phone I have decided that having a gadget for a phone is inconvenient. I really wanted to love this phone, but my hatred for the cumbersome device is growing every day.

What I needed to buy instead of the iPhone was a Netbook. I need a fully functioning browser, email and other productivity capability that the iPhone simply doesn’t offer. The screen on the iPhone is too small for what I need to do on the web, and despite Apple’s claims, there isn’t an app for everything.

Now, Apple and Daddy Jobs tell us we need an iPad. The iPad is supposed to be the next greatest thing, but is it?  I have my doubts.

I supposed, taken for what it is, the iPad would be a neat toy, however I have a bunch of toys, and the admission price to ride the iPad iFad, seems costly and limiting. Much has been made about the fact that the iPhone, and the iPad run a “modified” version of Apple’s OS X operating system, but I have to call bullshit on that. Sure there may be a stripped down, linux BSD style version of Darwin running under the shiny rounded square icons, but what one actually sees and is capable of using is essentially the OS X Dashboard Widget system and not a real operating system. It’s not even a real OS X Dashboard, since the real Dashboard is multi-tasking capable.

Yes, I’ve heard the arguments that the processor is limited, and that limits the capability of these “i” devices, but if that’s the case, why are they so damnably expensive? Daddy Jobs, says these devices will never run Adobe Flash because Flash is a resource hog, and it would compromise the speed of these fingerprint magnets.

The multi-touch interface is nice and very intuitive, but I can’t help but think of how completely awesome it would be on my 22” widescreen LCD monitors, or instead of attempting some unintuitive multi-touch on the track pad of a new MacBook, put it on the screen.

The appeal of the iPhone and iPad really can be boiled down to the interface. We humans are fascinated by swiping a finger across a surface and changing the image on the screen. Just look at any Fox, CNN, or MSNBC news channel for more than 30 minutes and you’ll see one of the Magic Walls, that allow the reporter to move things around and zoom, pan, blah blah blah.

While the people at Microsoft work at a solution to make handwriting to text work well, the people at Apple seem to be travelling in the opposite direction.

The iPhone, and the iPad are not designed to allow one to write on the screen. These devices will likely never see that capability, so you’ll be left with trying to take notes in a meeting while furiously typing on a virtual keyboard.

I suspect that many people will argue that the iPad was not designed for “productivity” and I would have to agree. I would also have to point out that the iPad was not designed for creativity either, which in my opinion, strays from the Apple mission.

So the iPad has to be considered a toy, an expensive toy. Many people seem to be enamored with the book reading capability, personally I prefer to just read a book, you know, the kind with words printed on paper, so I can dog ear the page when I need to stop.

The iPad is also reportedly a web browser and many people like to sit and squint at the screen to read blogs while zooming and swiping to move the focus of what they’re reading with a fingertip. Maybe I’m just too old, maybe my eyesight isn’t what it used to be, but this doesn’t appeal to me in the least. It’s the same hobbled version of Safari that appears on the iPhone. I don’t like the Safari web browser in any form.

The iPad is a large iPod as well, so one can listen to music on it happily fingering through album covers, and sifting through gigabytes of songs. Of course you’ll have to use earbuds or headphones, because the iPad speakers are going to lack something in fidelity. I hope the iPad has better speakers than the iPhone, because the iPhone built in speaker is very nearly useless.

No, I haven’t laid finger to an iPad, instead I am simply drawing conclusions based on the iPhone, which I have admittedly come to hate. Nothing I’ve seen, none of the hype at any rate, has lead me to believe that the iPad is anything other than an iPhone made bigger.

Sorry Apple, I love your computers, but the gadgets are of no interest to me. My next gadget purchase will be two fold. I will buy a Netbook with built in 3G access, and I will buy a different phone.