Rishad is wrong. (Not about much, mind you.) But at a recent Audience Targeting Summit in Las Vegas, Tobaccowala  called the iPad a “slouching device” and predicted the “greatest wave of buyers’ remorse” ever for Apple early adopters, to whom acquiring the latest device he likened to a religion.

But my octogenarian mom has another word for it: INVISIBLE.

Last month, she perched nervously on a dining room chair with a legal pad and pen handy, ready to take copious notes on all that would be required for her to learn how to use this new fangled “always on” iPad gizmo that her geeky daughter brought her. “You see this button, Mom? This turns it on. You see this icon here?” “That’s your AOL email.”

“But, where do I type my passwords?” she asked. “You don’t have to,” said I. Having worn ruts in the road to and from her house for literally years to retrieve birthplaces and catch phrases and dog’s names from itty bitty scraps of paper in gosh knows what desk drawer, I relished the next sentence: “Apple remembers your passwords for you.”

I think she was in shock – momentarily without words. “Well, how about that,” she said, engrossed in the new touch-screen world. “It only took them 30 years to make the computer disappear!”

My mother has always had a knack for hitting the nail on the head. Users want seamless access to any and all the “applications” and information they can no longer be without. Any-device in hand, newly empowered users can now speak search commands to their cell phones, track hard-to-find items locally, and do mobile user-to-user video Skype… er, actually, we’ll come back to that.

There’s always a catch, isn’t there? As John Stewart pointed out recently in chiding Steve Jobs for being a “apphole” for heavy-handed treatment of a blogger who dissected a company 4G iPhone prototype, it’s the handheld’s carrierthat is more often iPhone users’ perceived villain. As Stewart put it, only AT&T could make it impossible to use the iPhone as a phone. “Who drops three calls in five minutes on the West Side Highway. There are NO BUILDINGS!” he exclaimed in a recent monologue.

Living as we do on the digital precipice, my family has “triple-play-cable,” Verizon Wireless for business and home use for half of the family, and a fraying tolerance for the Brooklyn-based son with an iPhone and a penchant for dropped calls at the most inopportune moments possible.

So, yesterday when Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam let slip to The Wall Street Journal that his company is working with Google on a tablet device, you might think we were beside ourselves with giddy anticipation. An actual wireless roaming device with the Android operating system I love, on a network I can live with? Mmmm. What’s the catch?

The catch is all that bailing wire and twine behind the scenes that makes the network “disappear.” Verizon has to build out its 4G network, already in testing in select markets here and overseas with the help of Vodafone and China Mobile. Google will likely suspend its own plans to do the same and concentrate instead on its prowess in developing software and user interfaces. (If it had concentrated on this to the exclusion of wind farms, would we still see Jobs as Criss Angel to Google’s David Copperfield? Or, in plain terms, would Google already be running our Internet-enabled home entertainment system?)

Verizon Wireless is no doubt strongly motivated to expand a relationship that made Droid one of the more commercially successful launches of late, while simultaneously removing the real buyer’s remorse that derived from purchasing Moto’s last big seller, the tech-plagued Razor. If VZW can beat AT&T to market with 4G, and the 4G iPhone is ready to roll, could VZW perhaps have its cake (field multiple devices with the Android operating system) and eat it too (market an iPhone that actually functions as a phone)?

We’ll have to reserve judgment. After all, those who live life on the digital edge are always condemned to know the future but see it as just beyond our grasp. Why, it’s sort of like the feeling one gets after downloading the Skype mobile application to one’s Droid, only to be told Skype "doesn’t yet offer support for that device."

Ah, if technology could just make the carriers disappear…

McAdams hinted of just the opposite, thudding reality, telling the Journal, “The new network will likely bring a shift from current unlimited-use pricing plans….The old model of one price plan per device is going to fall away,” he said, adding that carriers will more likely sell a “bucket of megabytes” communicable to many devices.

Unfortunately, as the Journal summed it up, “With multiple devices, customers are likely to end up paying more for connecting their gadgets to the next-generation network than they do today, he said. ‘It's not out of the question.’”

Maybe the true buyer’s remorse is yet to come: too many connection plans – minus seamless connectivity – all wrapped up in a sheaf of monthly bills.

For my next slight of hand, I’ll be exchanging the miles between me and my mom's house in search of lost passwords for taking her to the local Starbucks instead. Cheer up, Mom; no offense, at least the coffee’s better.

FYI, if you're local to DC as I am, and are interested in the iPad ecosystem, WeMedia is holding a "Tabula Rasa" conclave at Gannett HQ on June 14 to showcase apps for the device. Check out the program here.