Dear Apple,

Wow, you had quite a month. Sure, it’s only been a week and a half since Steve Jobs died but, wow, what a way to honor him! So many releases, updates etc. in such a short period of time. I’m impressed. So maybe it didn’t go quite as smoothly as you might have liked, but I have to attribute a good deal of that to the fact that we are all so impatient that we insisted on downloading everything you made available as soon as you released it. No one on the planet can handle their servers being hammered as hard as yours were. I remember the MobileMe debacle quite well, and this didn’t rise to anything on that level so… congratulations.

That’s not, however, why I’m writing to you today.

No, I want to talk about Siri and voice recognition. I fully understand why you are not making the new service available on previous iPhones. I understand that older devices may not have quite enough power for Siri to function the way you want it to function. I get that. But here’s the thing – the power of the iPhone 4S is on par with the iPad 2. (In fact, the iPad 2 is a little bit faster.) There is no reason Siri won’t work perfectly on the iPad 2, so there’s no reason for you NOT to release it on that device.

Well, actually that’s not quite true. Wanting Siri to work smoothly on hardware that is powerful enough for the service is only one of the reasons you are only releasing it on the iPhone 4S. The other reason? You want people to upgrade to the new device. “Want Siri? Get a new iPhone 4S.” No, it’s not the friendliest customer service choice imaginable, but I get the fact that you are in the business to make money and this is one heck of a good way to ensure that you do. (It worked on Judie, Kevin, and me — didn’t it?)

That means if you hold off on adding Siri to the iPad 2 you will effectively “force” current iPad 2 users to upgrade to the iPad 3 in a few months. Again, it is not the most customer friendly approach, but I do get the fact that you are in the business of making gobs and gobs of money. You do it quite well. So fine, don’t put Siri on the iPad 2. But how about throwing us a bone and giving us the new keyboard with global voice recognition built into it? There’s no question the iPad 2 is powerful enough for it. I mean, seeing how well Nuance’s Dragon Dictation works on the iPhone 4 tells me you could add this keyboard to almost all of the current iOS devices without any issue.

And here’s the thing Apple – it is in your best interest to make voice recognition universally available via the keyboard. You won’t lose the advantage of having people want to upgrade to the new iPad when it is released because Siri won’t be available on “legacy devices”. Any of us who got the iPhone 4S and have used Siri for the past few days will happily upgrade in order to get it on an iPad if we are at all able to do so. Adding the voice recognition keyboard won’t slow down the upgrade juggernaut, but it will add a tremendous amount of value to the current iPad. Fast, accurate voice recognition will only speed up the adoption rate of the iPad for those of us using it as a productivity tool.

You know as well as we do that there are people who are hesitant to use the iPad to create content, because they don’t love working on the virtual keyboard. Sure, there are a host of keyboard cases but they add bulk and, for the most part, they aren’t nearly as good as what people are using on their laptops. By making this voice recognition available you will make it possible for people to quickly and easily use the iPad for email, yammer, tasks lists and more. As well as the iPad 2 continues to sell, I truly believe that adding voice recognition will add to the momentum that already exists.

You already have the voice recognition keyboard designed and operating properly on the iPhone 4. You already have universal voice recognition baked into iOS 5.0. I cannot imagine it would take a great deal for you to split out the voice recognition keyboard from the rest of Siri and make it available.

And Apple, please don’t give me the lame excuse that it requires a more powerful device… I wrote this entire post using Dragon Dictation on the iPhone 3GS.