Just the other day, I noticed that I hadn’t touched my MacBook Pro, an Early 2008 model, in several days, other than to use it as an audio monitoring station for the radio shows. At the same time, my iPhone had been in daily use for a surprisingly large portion of my computing needs, once I had finished my workday on the iMac of course.

But isn’t it just a smartphone? How does that have any connection whatever to a personal computer?

Well, let’s imagine for the sake of argument that the iPhone is nothing more than a tiny Mac with a variation of OS X optimized for a handheld device that sports a touchscreen and extremely limited system resources. Of course, that is precisely what the iPhone happens to be.

Of course this distinction is blurred because you don’t see the traditional computer desktop, and the usual proliferation of folders and icons. Yes, there are the icons, representing different apps, and, of course, wallpaper, a backdrop that is equivalent to the desktop pattern on your Mac or PC. But that’s hardly different from other smartphones and so-called feature phones.

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Have you had quite enough reading all those write-ups about the iPad? Well, a friend and frequent guest on the tech radio show wrote me the other day that “iPad is so old news and beaten to death, don’t you think?”

Well, it’s hard to say. If you own one, then you are busy learning the ropes and seeking out software to try. If you don’t have an iPad on your shopping list, you can turn the page. But if you’re like me, having just recently been exposed to one, then there is a whole lot to talk about, so let me begin.

I received a review sample, the 64GB Wi-Fi model, just a few days ago from Apple. They provided a case, a USB power adapter and an accessory dock. I didn’t request the keyboard, because I wanted to evaluate its usefulness as a portable standalone device. Once you add an accessory keyboard and other components, that utility is sacrificed. You might as well brandish your note-book computer.

My initial reaction is positive, but guarded. Yes, it does look, at first glance, like a grown up iPod touch. But the larger size is both a blessing and a curse, because you cannot hold it comfortably in one hand, and once you’re confined to both hands, you are forced to reconsider your work technique. I would also think this setup might present difficulties for someone who is handicapped, but no doubt there will be third-party accessories that help with accessibility issues.

In any case, the typing experience is also something I had to rediscover. I type with the traditional two hands on a regular keyboard. Since I had no real BlackBerry face time prior to owning an iPhone, I never mastered the two-finger typing technique. I get by with one finger on my iPhone, but that approach can be extremely awkward on the iPad’s larger surface. Horizontally, touch typing actually works, though it’ll take time for me to grow flexible. Placed in a vertical position, with the foreshortened keyboard layout, I have tried both a single finger and two fingers, but yet haven’t worked out a routine that suits. I’ll give it time.

Most of what you’ve heard about the iPhone OS and system responsiveness is true. It shuts down in seconds, starts up quite quickly, and all the apps and general functionality is near-instantaneous. So even though multitasking won’t come until the fall iPhone 4.0 update for the iPad, you don’t suffer much from its lack except for a few prescribed tasks, such as playing a Pandora stream in the background and so on and so forth.

The Mail interface is not well thought out. If you are using several accounts, it defaults to the last message you read in an individual account, with the Inbox a click away. You want a standard overview, you have to backtrack to the window with the Accounts button on it, and click on Accounts to see them all. The Accounts view is the default scheme on the iPhone, and that’s a better solution; that is, until iPhone 4.0 comes along with the global Inbox feature and other enhancements.

Now maybe there’s a Mail setup option somewhere that I’m overlooking, but the Settings panel didn’t reveal any, and the iPad, and Apple’s mobile devices in general, don’t sport any of those optional or secret features that you can somehow access if you observe a special technique. It’s not at all like the setup on a Mac or a PC.

One of the reasons I have seriously considered an iPad is as an electronic reading devices, and here it excels. Apple’s iBooks software is simple, elegant, and makes reading your favorite books a joy to behold. I’ve already populated it with a few free titles to get a sense of the functionality, and I’m highly impressed.

Some publishers, such as Time magazine, are getting into the act with separate retail apps for every issue, at approximately the cost of the print version. But I opted for the free USA Today iPad app, which provides a decent alternative to the mobile or standard site.

In any case, I am the sort of person who prints copies of longer Web-based documents. I am trying to wean myself from that costly practice, and the iPad offers a load of promise. If I don’t have to regularly feed my printers with those expensive consumables, the cost of the iPad will be quickly covered

One more note: Wi-Fi reception is decent enough. In the master bedroom, at the other side of our home, I usually get from two to three bars signal strength on the iPhone. With the iPad it ranges from one to three bars, but performance remains pretty good. As you may have read, some people have reported spotty signal strength in places where other wireless devices fare reasonably well. Assuming the iPad has essentially the same off-the-shelf Wi-Fi hardware as other mobile gadgets, maybe Apple could resolve the sensitivity issues with a firmware update, but I find its reception quite acceptable right now.

Understand this is not a review so much as a set of preliminary observations. I’ll have lots more to say in the weeks to come in these columns and on the radio show, so stay tuned.

As you no doubt know, Apple continues to make it clear that Flash isn’t coming to their mobile platform in our lifetime. At the same time, Adobe and others are complaining about a change in the iPhone 4.0 SDK user license, which blocks apps translated from Flash or ported using developer tools that don’t conform to their requirements.

The criticisms are all over the place, but mostly challenge Apple’s right to restrict the use of other computer programming languages to make iPhone apps. One of those criticisms has it that Apple is, in effect, trying to prevent the use of new programming techniques on their mobile platform.

Well, before I go any further, may I remind these critics that the change applies strictly to a single version of the iPhone OS. It doesn’t cover iPhone 5.0 or its successors, and certainly Apple reserves the right to change those terms whenever they want. But it’s also not a case of Apple’s closed platform preventing the use of, say, Flash, since Flash is Adobe’s closed platform.

The problem once again is that the folks attacking Apple are ignoring the real issues, which are all about producing sub-standard apps. With iPhone 4.0, Apple is touting 100 new features, including enhanced multitasking. There are 1500 new APIs available to developers. These enhancements will provide for apps with greater flexibility and enhanced performance.

But what if hundreds or thousands of new apps don’t support all or most of the new features because the cross-platform compiling tools developers are using do not include the new features? Who suffers? What about the iPhone and iPad user who tries out a new app and finds that multitasking and other new features aren’t available? What about the developer’s bottom line, when customers abandon them in droves because they are delivering inferior products?

Just why would Apple add those restrictions? Just to place arbitrary controls over the way App Store software is developed? Well, of course that’s their right. Apple is under no legal obligation, so far as anyone has demonstrated, to allow you to use third-party development environments to build apps for their mobile platforms. At the same time Steve Jobs is widely quoted as saying that porting apps to the iPhone platform results in “sub-standard” products. The critics, with all their over-the-top whining, never seem to be able to respond to that complaint.

Yes, it is quite true that a company that wants to build apps for different mobile platforms will have a lot more work to do if they want their software to appear in the App Store. But consider the end result, which is that they will be forced to build better products that fully support all the latest and greatest features in the iPhone OS. What’s wrong with that?

I suppose if they could produce apps in a third-party tool that makes them fully complaint with Apple’s standards, then they have nothing to complain about.

But don’t forget the lessons of history. There are thousands upon thousands of Mac OS X apps that are simply clumsy ports from other platforms, usually Windows. Software publishers are trying to get into the Mac platform on the cheap in many cases, so they end up with apps that only pay lip service for Mac user interface guidelines and fail to support all of the advanced features of the operating system. Sure, they run all right, and in many cases, the clumsy interfaces and performance limitations may not matter so much to many users. Sometimes just having the product itself on the Mac is its own reward, although I would think that any company that wants to really prosper on the platform would do their level best to deliver the best software they can, and not cheap out.

Yes, I realize that a sprawling productivity app with millions of lines of computer code may require a huge expenditure in time and money to port to Apple’s Xcode, and a much greater investment to optimize and support all the latest and greatest features in Snow Leopard. It all comes down to the return on that investment, and I would expect Mac users prefer apps that actually feel like Mac apps rather than a cheap imitation.

Now I have suggested that some of the harshest criticisms about Apple’s opposition to Flash and the user license changes may have been fueled by Adobe, which stands to lose the most under that situation. This week, Adobe has reportedly announced, in fact, that they are abandoning further development of their Flash to iPhone porting tool.

On the other hand, maybe this situation will inspire Adobe to find a way to build a version of Flash that answers all of Apple’s concerns. But with record sales of the iPhone, and an incredible demand for the iPad, Adobe’s window of opportunity is closing really fast. It may well be that it’s too late, and that Flash will, in a few years, largely disappear from millions of sites as they are updated to support the tens of millions of Internet visitors who don’t have Flash on their computing devices.

Then again, if those third-party tools can be made to support all or most of the new features in iPhone 4.0, maybe the naysayers would have a point. But that’s the issue that they have, so far at least, chosen to avoid.

I feel vindicated once again. This past weekend, I questioned the veracity of a set of U.S.-based sales figures from IDC that painted a pretty mediocre picture for Mac sales in the past quarter. Supposedly they failed to keep up with the PC market as a whole.

Of course, when Apple released the real numbers Tuesday afternoon, you just knew IDC screwed up big time on its U.S. estimates, to be charitable. Indeed, in reporting the numbers for the March quarter, Apple reported selling 2.94 million Macs, close enough to the mystical three million figure to amaze in a quarter noted for slow sales.

Those figures don’t reflect the recent MacBook Pro product refresh, which has been highly praised in early reviews. So how about four million Macs for the holiday quarter?

All in all, Apple posted revenue of $13.50 billon, compared to $9.08 billion last year. Quarterly profit soared to $3.07 billion, or $3.33 per undiluted share, while last year the profits came to $1.62 billion, or $1.79 per undiluted share.

The huge surprise in Apple’s Mac sales was the 40% increase for desktops, no doubt largely due to the continuing popularity of the iMac, which was revised last fall. Note-book sales were up 28%, even though the product lineup was rather long in the tooth.

The iPhone also went way ahead of estimates, which were mostly below seven million units. But you already had a hint of where it would go during last week’s iPhone 4.0 rollout, where Apple reported selling over 50 million iPhones, without saying how much above that figure. It turned out that sales actually increased 131 percent to 8.75 million. During the same quarter, some 10.89 million iPods were sold, and that represents a one percent unit decline for a mature market.

But remember that the iPhone consistently cannibalizes sales from the iPod, so it’s hard to know what the figures might have been in a world where Apple never entered the smartphone marketplace. In any case, Apple still boasts holding over 70 percent of the U.S. market for music players, and improved market shares in such countries as Australia, the U.K., Canada and Japan.

iTunes also did well, with sales reaching $1.1 billion. Some four billion downloads have been recorded at the Apple Store, but Apple continues to report that they only do slightly better than break even on these ventures. It’s all about selling new hardware.

If you want more raw numbers to chew over, check Apple’s press release on the subject.

During the quarterly conference call with financial analysts, it was revealed that Apple TV sales had grown 34 percent over the previous year, but they didn’t break out unit sales. So far as they are concerned, it remains a “hobby.” But clearly there’s no incentive to kill the product line, although you have to wonder if Apple has an end game that will reveal itself over the next year or two. And, no, I am highly skeptical of the prospects of Apple building their own large screen TV, 3D or otherwise.

After revealing last week that a half million iPads were sold during the very first week, Apple had no additional numbers to offer, but they did deny those occasional reports of production problems. The delay in the international launch by a month was due solely to the fact that U.S. demand was stronger than they expected. According to COO Tim Cook, “It has shocked us, the level of demand, at least initially.” When you consider that Cook is considered the best inventory manager on the planet, this statement is of particular significance, and it does mean that the iPad may yet be a bigger success on the long term than anyone expects.

One other important point, and that is that, according to Cook, Apple still doesn’t know if iPad sales will cannibalize sales from Macs. During the conference call, Cook stated, “there was nothing obvious in the iPad numbers or the Mac numbers” to suggest that sort of result, but it’s still early in the game.

Apple’s clear target with the iPad remains netbooks, with Cook concluding: “To me it’s a no brainer. iPad, netbook, it’s sort of 100 to zero. I can’t think of a single thing the netbook does well, and iPad does so many things so very well. I’m already personally addicted to mine. I couldn’t live without it.”

In late trading, Wall Street clearly loved the figures, with Apple’s per share prices soaring over 5%.

Now it’s a sure thing that the Apple haters will want to locate the bad news in the good, as usual. They’ll carefully examine gross profit margins, per unit sales and other numbers to seek out possible flies in the ointment. If there are none, they’ll make up something to provoke flames and vitriol.

However, it’s clear the critics are going to have serious trouble criticizing Apple’s sales results. Even Rob Enderle, the notorious “industry analyst” who is in the pocket of the likes of Dell and Microsoft, was quoted as being extremely pleased with Apple’s results. If he can’t find a way to knock Apple, what about the rest of the PC shills?