Why the obsession to make the Internet Tablet be a computer (see, for example, Trusted Reviews)? Or a PDA? Or a cellphone? Allegedly this is because people want to carry fewer devices, hence the upswing in convergence.

But is that really where we are headed?

If you go back a couple generations, there was a time when every family had one television, and before that one radio. And then as they became less expensive, more were added and maybe you even had one per person. Radios are now so cheap, we have one for each possible use -- one in each car, one in each bedroom (attached to a clock) and in the kitchen, one in the home stereo system, one in each boombox and in each portable tape or CD player, special ones built on a clip just for going jogging.

In my own household -- two adults, two children -- we have ten radios. They're all optimized to a single situation, and we think that's right. We don't see this as violating some principle of multiple use (or minimum use either -- how many minutes a week is a shower radio on, anyway? Or the guestroom clock-radio?). We follow the "specific devices for specific needs" principle.

And that applies to computers too. To tablets.

You know, if I can access my files on the network, and I use web-apps, why do I care about "synching" my internet tablet with a PC? Just as I want that clip-radio for jogging, I want to carry a small but suitable device for surfing, reading and, you know, anything that might come up -- a see-me voip call, some work, some music, a game. But, heck, at other times, I want that laptop. And at still other times, I carry some index cards and a one-dollar Optiflow pen and leave the tablet at home.

Soon enough today's internet tablets will sell for $50 - $100, and we'll have a slew of them. (Yes, we'll have some extraordinary $400 devices then, too.) It'll be access to the network that they each provide, so it won't matter which one I pick up: my information won't be quarantined in separate devices constantly falling out-of-synch with every other device I use. And, likely as not, the capabilities will be downloaded from the network too, or on the network entirely.

Our cellphones and our internet tablets are just the first devices to be pocketable and derive their worth from the network -- no connect, no use -- and our expectations are driven by the old-paradigm devices of yesteryear (eg, 2005). I mean, after all, would you have even considered buying a PDA back in the day if it didn't work offline? And, in the end, isn't that pretty much the way the internet tablet is?

That's where we're headed, I think. Not there yet, by any stretch of the imagination, and I yield to no man in counting on the off-network apps in my own 770. But I can feel it coming, every time I reach over to check the alarm on my clock-radio and see the internet tablet resting on the bedside table. Soon enough I'll have a bedside tablet, and a breakfast table tablet and a tablet in the car that always lives there, like the radio.