No Ink on the iPad

I have to say that I was stunned to learn that the iPad has no inking capabilities. It seems like such a no-brainer. When companies like Toshiba, Lenovo etc came out with their tablets back in the early aughts, they were just about the perfect format for mind mapping. I spent many a meeting scribing all my notes with my digital pen, drawing flow diagrams, shapes--whatever I wanted. But those tablets were heavy, and crippled by horrible battery life (you could do anything you wanted on them...for three hours).

So for Apple to come out with a device that allows no writing at all... I understand that they're battling Kindle, and so produced a device that you could not just read books on, but also watch video on. Oh, be still my beating heart. Heaven knows we need yet another way to watch TV.

Maybe it's too early to feel diappointed. Maybe Apple is hard at work on the next gen of the iPad (no, I don't mean the UberiPad). Maybe the digitial pen will return, attached to the perfect lightweight, eight-hours-of-battery-life tablet. That would be the day many of us have longed for--when we can combine the brilliance of mind mapping with the power of computing for an entire working day. We just seem to keep circling the perfect scenario, never getting much closer to it.