With all the chatter about Apple's iPad, you'd think it was the first tablet computer ever available, although tablet computing has been around awhile.

Bill Gates in 2001 predicted tablet computing would overtake traditional computers by 2006, and Apple itself noodled around with its Newton PDA tablet for almost a decade. I have been writing my columns for several years on a small, lightweight tablet computer. If you don't have a tablet PC, Wacom offers a whole line of separate tablet cursor controls that attach to PCs via USB. (I expect to review these in the near future.)

Yet none of these exudes the excitement of Apple's iPad because it looks like Apple is going to change the game again -- just like with the iPod and iPhone. Apple's iPad is a slick mobile device that weighs only 11/2 pounds (half the weight of my HP tablet), and gives you a full 9.7-inch touch screen. You can use your fingers to move things around the screen, take actions on your applications and use gestures like you would with your iPod Touch.

In fact, the iPad is much like the iPod Touch, starting with its ability to run most of the 140,000 iPod Touch apps. I have not yet had my hands on an iPad, but much of what Steve Jobs and his legion of followers (including many in the press) have reported shows that the iPad is not meant to be your typical production computer (although it does feature an on-screen keyboard).

You wouldn't buy the iPad if all you want is a word processor and spreadsheet machine. You'd buy it if you're a traveler who likes to take along your favorite books or watch movies while on the road. You'd buy it if you like the types of apps you find on an iPod touch or iPhone but don't really like the small screen on a typical smart phone.

Apple plans on being your favorite book vendor and already has signed up five major publishers who will sell their titles through Apple's new iBookstore for $12.99 to $14.99, in much the same way as you might now buy music through the iTunes Music Store. So in one way, Apple is making a frontal assault on Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader, two high-flying electronic book readers.

Apple also plans on having you surf the Web with the iPad and play your favorite video games -- which places it against PCs (typically laptops) and maybe even video game systems in some respects. You'll connect to your favorite Wi-fi hot spot (on the lower-priced iPads) and to the Net via AT&T (on the higher-end systems for a monthly fee).

With prices ranging from $500 to almost $1,000 depending on configuration, it's also less expensive than the previous generation of tablet computers. And the contract with AT&T has no minimum commitment. It has no hard drive to break -- only a solid state disk with no moving parts. Mr. Jobs claims it will have a 10-hour battery life and standby for a month. But it doesn't play Adobe Flash, so many Web pages will need to be rewritten before you can view them as they were meant to be viewed.

By the time we all get our hands on the iPad, it might be called something else, because the iPad name was trademarked by Fujitsu. But industry pundits are betting that Mr. Jobs personally makes sure that Fujitsu hands over the name, just as he got Cisco to hand over the iPhone name in 2007.

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