Audrey

I was discussing the newly-introduced iPad with my wife — she's anxious to buy one; I'm impressed, though in no particular hurry — and it struck me that the iPad represents, in many ways, part of a new class of computers as "appliances." Smaller, somewhat less powerful devices that perform a small number of tasks and fill a specific niche. I suppose you could put the iPod Touch in that category, as well, though not the iPhone. (Have you ever considered your phone to be an appliance?}

And then I remembered that Palm Computing (or rather, their parent corporation 3Com) had tried to introduce something very much like this many, many years ago — the Audrey. It was a simple, but useful device: "users could access the Internet, send and receive e-mail, play audio and video, and synchronize with up to two Palm OS-based devices." (Ironically, it was also $499.) But the product never caught on, and was discontinued after less than a year. I don't think there was any place in the market for a device like that — a decade ago, we didn't use the Internet in the same way we do today, and it wasn't as pervasive as it has become, so the idea of spending a great deal of money on a simplified device for Internet use when you probably already had a desktop computer (that cost a great deal more) would have seemed absurd. And 3Com was never able to build on the success of the Palm platform in the way that Apple has built on the iPhone platform.

Devices like these have been long-promised, and we might see more of thm in the years to come — though the iPad comes to dominate that category the way the iPhone and iPod have theirs, perhaps not so many.