Careful reading of Pogue's columns this year has taught me a surprising lesson: Most technology writers jump the gun on hot products or categories. They're too eager to prove their on-top-of-it-ness in the tech world.

Pogue, by contrast, exercises nearly superhuman patience. He waits. Sometimes he gets an advance briefing, such as his exclusive in January 2007. Much of the time, though, Pogue hangs back until a point at which any other gadget reviewer would be embarrassed to write about, say, the Flip camera () or Twitter (.)

This week, David Pogue finally writes about , a topic the Standard has been for months. Pogue's shtick is clever: He plays the role of the buffoon who has belatedly wandered into the action long after he should have, much like P.J. O'Rourke covering the Middle East for Rolling Stone in the 1980s. Like O'Rourke, Pogue serves as a proxy for his reader: Not an insider, but an outsider with questions that would make insiders roll their eyes in contempt.

Pogue takes the hit for his readers. They're not the early adopters on Geoffrey Moore's . They're the pragmatists and conservatives. The mass market. The horde of buyers who actually make gadget manufacturers rich. Pogue lets them feel normal which, statistically, they are. He answers the questions they've only now come around to asking out loud.

"Well, this is a little embarrassing," he wrote about the Flip. "One of the most significant electronics products of the year slipped into the market, became a mega-hit, changed its industry -- and I haven't reviewed it yet." Cute, but the truth is he waited until its significance was undeniable before saying so. He's not interested in predicting the future of the camera market. He wants to tell readers about the hottest camera on the market right now.