The painful truth – which I am slow to acknowledge because it feels like a kind of defeat – is that pretty much all of the content I care about is now available online. There are still other great things I want to read: there are bookshops full of books only available on paper, print newspapers that are a physical pleasure to handle, and glossy magazines that have a glamour and a visual appeal that no screen can match.

However, the truth is that if I’m looking for timely, exciting, vivid words, the web is a fountain of inexhaustible interest. If I want to know about the credit crunch, or the US elections, or what my friends are thinking or doing, it’s a carnival of distraction and delight and is now and for the foreseeable future the biggest library, newsstand, and magazine rack in the world.

Unfortunately you need a computer to access the web, and the web is far too important to be handled by PCs. When you want the web you want it, and you don’t want to deal with security updates and operating system crashes and all the other dreck that comes with computers.

The web’s efficiencies begin when you have a clean browser. Like the remote control that you spend half an hour looking for in order to save all that time walking back and forth to control your television, the vagaries of our PC devices are frequently an enormous drag on internet productivity. My wife says, “What’s on at the Phoenix Cinema?”I find the laptop, boot it up, and the browser crashes. I reboot the browser and struggle to connect to the network, and spend five minutes working out that my son has turned off the laptop’s wi-fi control. This is a small, invisible switch hidden on the side of the laptop and designed to signal its state with enormous ambiguity. Huffing and puffing, I finally log on, in a noticeably bad mood, a good ten minutes after that initial request. It would have been much, much quicker to look up the number in the phone book and call the cinema.

Despite these hurdles between me and all that great content online, I can feel my dependence on great web reading material grow day by day. I flip down the laptop in the office, walk into the living room, and realise that the paper I want to read isn’t yesterday’s, sitting on the table, but today’s New York Times. I stare at the folded newsprint and wonder if by shaking it, iPhone style, I can somehow get fresh stories to appear on the pages. I could crack open another laptop, but I don’t want to because they’re heavy and they’re tricked out with e-mail and messaging applications that remind me of work.

On the Tube and the train, I can read e-mail, a Twitter feed, and plough through loads of great websites via an offline RSS reader – currently Viigo on a Blackberry. This is much better than trying to fight with a paper, especially when the train gets crowded, (although if you’re strap-hanging as well, you need some sort of improvised pouch to give you hands-free access to a cup of coffee as well. Dragon’s Den pitch anyone? I’m thinking Commute KupHolder.) On the sofa, however, squinting at a Blackberry isn’t my idea of a good time.

The device I really want is a mash-up of Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s MacBook Air, and a netbook: it should feel light and good in the hand like the Air, do one thing really well like the Kindle – but that one thing should be web browsing, not electronic books. I remain unconvinced about electronic books, although I know the Kindle has found some passionate fans. If I travelled a lot and carried a lot of books with me it might make sense, that but seems a minority sport. What I want is a web appliance with a great browser, perhaps on a tablet of some kind to break that laptop/work connection. It should feel more lean-back than lean-forward, and be optimised for passive reading rather than active computing. It doesn’t need a demanding keyboard, just an iPhone-style soft keyboard and some big buttons that make it super-easy to navigate. It should have a bundled, always-on net connection that just works, like the 3G data connection on my Blackberry, so I never have to think about the network.

It should be about the size of Time magazine, and display little else but the actual web page – just a browser in your hand. And it should feel light and tough enough that I can pop it into my bag and read it on the Tube without feeling as though I’ve got a real computer on my lap (extra points if it folds in half across its vertical axis, so I can pop it into a generous overcoat pocket.) It should also have enough memory to download a huge amount of content, so that I can use it as an offline reader when I’m on the train or a plane and want to chow through my RSS feeds. And it should use some magic e-ink screen technology so it’s got a huge battery life – but can still handle streaming video.

This portable web reader would become my primary way of accessing newspapers, magazines, blogs and streaming video, becoming my portable TV of choice for accessing the news. It would be like the electronic tablet that one of the astronauts used in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, a thin rectangle of screen I could place casually on the table beside my cereal in the morning, showing BBC News 24 when I want breaking news and Boing-Boing when I want some amusing diversion.

I know many people love their iPhones and are already having much of this experience with those excellent devices, but in the end I’d like a full screen that displays web content the way it was meant to be viewed. I know many people love their Kindles, and are already automatically downloading the magazines and papers they care about. Its electronic paper uses very little power, and as an application-specific device it’s much less hassle than an all-purpose device like a PC, but right now it has a bad a web experience. Why shouldn’t it? Amazon doesn’t want you reading free web content; it wants you purchasing electronic books for cold hard cash.

I know there are some gorgeous high-end laptops out there, but they cost a fortune: spending more than £2,000 on something which you’re going to use for web browsing doesn’t make sense to me. I’m looking to spend £500 on a slick web reader with an aesthetic that doesn’t say, “Honey, I work too hard and I’m actually checking e-mail.” I’m sure the sudden interest in the Asus Eee-style low-cost netbook is partly driven by demand for this kind of product. If Apple’s most recent MacBook upgrade had included a netbook with twice the screen area of the iPhone, as was rumoured online, that would probably have scratched my itch, but alas this was mere rumour.

Are you with me? Am I crazy? Do you have the same requirements? Or have you jury-rigged a tablet, an offline reader, and a 3G data card to give yourself most of what I’m describing? Let me know in the comments below - and if you’re a company with a new portable web reader I should see, send ‘em in. I’d also love to see design ideas for a Commute KupHolder: give that cup a third hand!

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Michael Parsons is Wired International Channel Manager for CondéNet International. He was the launch Editor of CNET.co.uk, and helped to launch The Industry Standard magazine