By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

The question is meant for people who bought or received the original iPad since its release in April 2010. See, I keep meeting people who gave up iPad -- and not because they're preparing to buy its successor, which geekdom expects will be announced tomorrow. I consistently hear giver-uppers say they no longer used Apple's tablet much, or at all.

I sold my iPad in December, mainly because my smartphone, the Google-branded Nexus S, proved to be good enough on the go and the 11.6-inch MacBook Air otherwise was light enough and offered more capabilities (granted reading ebooks or from the browser is more enjoyable on iPad). I know of at least two other MBA users who ditched iPad for similar reasons. Disclosure: I'm not exactly feeling good about the Air quality today. After several days of ongoing program crashes, the laptop locked up and won't bootup past the grey system check screen. If there wasn't flash memory in the thing, I would assume it was hard drive failure. But that's topic for another post.

Back to topic, last week, I met several more people who had sold or passed along their iPads. "I gave mine to my sister," one woman attending a Sony event told me. Like most other people I hear about abandoning iPad, she is a gadget geek and early adopter.

Perhaps iPad wasn't challenging enough, as she basically described using it as becoming boring. Maybe it's the "next-best thing syndrome," something I see often among gadget geeks. Today's hot toy is tomorrow's throwaway. Whatever the reason, I am observing more tablet exhaustion that reminds of the netbook craze. That small, light netbook appealed to many geeks before they slammed smack into long-term effects of living with its limitations.

It's a contextual thing really. A smartphone is great for playing games or surfing the web when there's nothing else. In the context of having nothing better, the device is good enough. But back home, you choose the PC to surf the web or play games or fire up the game console. The same can be said about iPad, and even Android tablets. What's good enough in certain contexts is tiring use long term when there are other choices, like PC with mouse and keyboard.

This is where someone rushes to comments and cries "Wait! You wrote 'The PC era is over.'" I wrote that the era is over. We've entered the cloud-connected device era. But I clearly stated and reaffirm here that the PC won't go away any time soon. In the "mobile context," the smallest, most