i just read this review of the iLane at nytimes.com:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/te...f=personaltech

and i'm pretty sure everything this insanely overpriced device can do, an NIT could do better. in fact, it's very limited in function: read your e-mail to you and reply/reply-all/forward with canned responses or voice messages recorded and encoded on-the-fly as mp3 attachments. oh, and it'll read other things from the web, like news and weather and stuff. the only thing the tablets are missing is speech recognition.

<rant> I'm a bit annoyed that text-to-speech is getting so much attention these days. it's been around since before i was born--more importantly, and it hasn't gotten much better over the years. but i've never actually heard apple's new shuffle try to pronounce brad mehldau, pat metheny, or béla fleck, so i can't be absolutely certain it will botch them. i always get frustrated when a so-called "new" or "cutting edge" technology is actually very old and it's just been re-packaged and overly hyped. sorry, apple; sorry iLane; i'm not impressed. $600 is f-ing ridiculous, and it doesn't even make sense to charge a monthly fee. it requires a blackberry, for crying out loud! blackberry can check your e-mail. someone PLEASE make an app for blackberry that reads your e-mail aloud and save some idiots $600.</rant>

so i just wanted to show my support for anyone who's working on speech recognition on the tablets. it would open up a whole new world of accessibility: hands-free operation while driving.

That is truly out of control. And the article is just so ridiculous.

dude, no.

Wisely avoided? For $600 I would expect it to dictate my speech. You can dictate speech to text through Microsoft Office 2007! Why not on this? Disaster could result? Why not just have the syntho-lady read your message back to you? It might be just me but this thing seems like it falls into the category of "exploit-rich-people-who-want-to-feel-technologically-superior-but-don't-know-better."

Meh. Oh well. Life goes on and there is just another thing that I won't be buying.