Clapboard - Full Frontal Nerdity

Here we are, about to start a new week.  How many of us are wondering how we got to where we are? I'm definitely one of the people who are.  Welcome to our lives - it's weird here, so enjoy it.  Try not to look too deep.

So the Apple tablet has everyone's knickers in a twist.  Apple is going to blow up your expectations of what a slab of silicon and a plastic screen can do.  They're going to sell you rainbows and angels' wings in a oversimplified white box and everyone is going to pee on themselves about how awesome it's going to be.  And it'd better be awesome.

Here's why.

After Apple releases the tablet, that'll be it.  The same week that the iphone came out, everything in the cell phone industry ground to a halt and here we are, twenty years later (in tech time, anyway), with no innovation beyond the addition of wifi, eventually.  So Apple defined the new generation of phones, and here we are, waiting for them to define the budding generation of tablet PCs.  And it's not going to be awesome.

If you hung out with me during a very specific point during the late spring of 2007, you heard one of my rants on what I wanted from a tablet, so you should probably stop reading this now.  In fact, I'm going to put the rest of this rant below the break so that you don't even see it if you don't want.

I've been a more-or-less loyal Sprint customer for a long time now.  Back in 1998, my only connection to the outside world was a Sprint phone - one that didn't work in my hotel or in a lot of other places, but that worked well enough to make calls to people I loved and missed (the list was long).  I don't remember my plan, exactly, but I'm pretty sure it was 500 minutes with free nights and weekends starting at 9 and ending at 7am for $50 a month.  The phone didn't text (none did), and there was nothing like data or music playing or anything else.  The screen barely showed the phone number and the name of the caller, but I did take a call from my dad on a beach in Rio while riding my bike up 6th avenue in rush hour traffic.  That's maybe my favorite phone call of all time, or at least it's right up there, so that phone held a special place in my heart.

UPDATE: the last 9/10ths of this rant have been moved below the break because I hated how it made the page look.  Bye.