Yes I know. You can’t technically order an Apple iPad just yet. But if you happen to have a friend who works at an Apple store you can do all sorts of things that can help you get your name on lists.

Nothing clandestine. It’s just a fact of life that asking a friend who works at an Apple store to tell you when the Apple iPad comes into stock and is ready to order is probably going to get you a better response than just registering with millions of others for a faceless automated update.

Well, maybe. We shall see.

I don’t use an iPhone and probably never will. Although my house is full of Apple gear, ranging from a 10 year old Titanium Powerbook to a top of the range iMac, complete with unfeasibly large screen, plus the usual plethora of iPods, the iPhone has never really appealed to me.

Not because I don’t love Apple products but because the iPhone is an Apple product that I genuinely don’t think I would use. I’m old fashioned when it comes to phones. I want a phone to be a phone, nothing else. And if the great unwashed want to force phone manufactures to add masses of features to their products then I’m certainly not going to pay a premium to use one of them.

I use a Nokia e71. I can hear people laughing at how underpowered it is in comparison to a shiny iPhone. That maybe the truth, it almost certainly is the truth, but for making phone calls and receiving phone calls, there is, obviously, no difference at all.

As long as I can speak into one end of the phone and put my ear to the other I’m happy.

I don’t need a camera. I have a real camera.

I don’t need a video camera. I have a real camera.

Etc. etc. etc.

But all of these criticisms pale into insignificance compared to my real gripe with the iPhone. It’s too small to make good use of the features that it has. Again, I can hear the masses circling with their pitchforks. But please, hear me out. Does anyone really browse the internet comfortably on a tiny screen? Play movies on it? Play games on it?

Come on. Really?

Ok, maybe you do. And that’s cool. But it wouldn’t work for me.

Enter the iPad. Without looking into it in any detail it already allows me, and probably a lot of people like me, to get access to all of the wonderful iPhone stuff without being hamstrung by a tiny screen.

But there is another reason why I simply have to have an Apple iPad as soon as possible.

As a musician an Apple iPad will be an indispensable tool and something that I will write in more detail about at a new location in the near future.

That last line wasn’t meant as some kind of cryptic clue to the huge changes going on behind the scenes here at Upstart Blogger, it was just a simple statement of fact. When I write about the iPad again it will be on another blog that hasn’t even launched yet.

Talking of those behind the scenes changes, and going off on a slightly unrelated but possibly necessary tangent, a deal has been done, an agreement has been reached, the necessary investment and investors have been found, certain products that used to be for sale are now free, the multi author situation has been pruned and reshaped into something much more positive for everyone concerned, and everyone should, hopefully, be happy with the result as 2010 lurches forward at a frightening pace.

But for now, imagine this. You’re a musician. Therefore you are already probably using a Mac and almost certainly run either Sibelius or Finale. Both of those systems allow you to scan music in and export it out as a PDF.

Suddenly there is no need for any musician to ever carry truck loads of sheet music ever again. And as someone who spends an awful lot of time in rehearsal or recording studios, fighting with tattered copies of scores that carry warnings that make anyone with a writing implement fear for their lives, that is a big deal.

Any musician who has had to fumble through piles of lead sheets while a director silently barks (musicians will know what I mean) changes to the set list will understand just how tantalising this prospect really is.

And yes, I am aware that music serving tablet devices have been around for a long time, but none of them were made by Apple and none of them had the necessary desirability to usefulness ratio that the Apple iPad has. Nor did they give individual musicians the ability to email each other during those boring passages in the pit. Again, musicians will understand the pit reference while others may be left head scratching. Which is another reason why I should perhaps only go into more musician centric detail when I am fully installed elsewhere.

Will the Apple iPad save the newspaper industry? No. Because Newspapers are fine just the way they are and people like them the way they are.

Will the Apple iPad change the way we read books? Unlikely. If Amazon can’t change things with Kindle then can Apple climb that particular mountain? Maybe.

Will the Apple iPad be an indispensable tool for musicians and the must have piece of gear for 2010. Yes.

I think it will.

So now all I need to do is sit back and wait for my friend to call, hand over my credit card details and wait. In the meantime I’ll start preparing to gigabytes and gigabytes of scores that are sitting on multiple hard drives around my studio.