Fanboy...

I’m hopelessly addicted to all things new and shiny… Gadgets make me happy in a way most people will never fully understand. That I’ve switched my allegiance to the bright and shiny products developed by Apple for my computing and telecommunications needs is letting me develop a personal pool of electronic gadgets that is becoming more and more tightly integrated. My phone talks to my laptop talks to the cloud… If satellite phone service ever gets to a point of being almost reasonable on price, I’d have nearly 24/7/365 tie-in to the grid. I get a warm fuzzy by being able to reach out at any time from any place… Ironic, I know, for someone who doesn’t have all that much use for people. But where I don’t know much about people, I do know that I like having access to the data that populates the web. While maybe not the sum total of human knowledge, it’s getting damnedably close to the sum total of human knowledge that most of us will ever need to know. The more data that I have available at any given time, the more I like it.

Tomorrow, I’m hoping to hear an announcement out of San Francisco that will add one more layer to connectivity. Apple’s iPad, iSlate, iWhatever should fill the gap between where it’s inappropriate to have a cell phone out and about and where a laptop could be considered overkill. I’m thinking here about 2-3 day road trips, a bevy of staff and project meetings, and all manner of places around the house and the office. I’m thinking here of something that could reasonably replace the pens and legal pads that I tote from meeting to meeting and from city to city… One more link in the chain of perpetual connectivity tied to the cloud by 3G and WiFi.

I’ve been a slobbering fool for technology long enough to know that many “game changers” aren’t… But my last two years with Apple have taught me to expect the unexpected and that sometimes game changers are exactly that. I know some will argue that other companies have done it first, but they would be hard pressed to argue that any previous attempt at a true tablet is as elegant in form or as integrated with a hardware family as whatever Apple rolls out tomorrow. I’m planning to be all geeked out and tuned in to the real-time tech bloggers tomorrow afternoon at 12:00 CST as Steve throws down the gauntlet one more time. This ought to be sweet.