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Like the MacBook Air, Apple’s newest object for those who are technology and rationally challenged to spend their cash on, the iPad, is merely a packaged series of errors and mis-judgement doomed to failure.  Wait, I take that back, in a reality where people are actually capable of reasoning about the value and utility products offered by companies the iPad would never see the light of day, but we do not live in such a reality.  Instead, we live in a reality where, ironically, a company that produced one of the best TV commercials ever, the infamous 1984 commercial, has itself become the “big brother” of the book “1984″, mixed with the depressing cynicism of H.L. Menken.

As for the 1984 aspect of Apple it all boils down to DRM (a.k.a. digital rights/restrictions management), and a completely walled off garden in the form of the “App Store”.  I will not belabor this aspect of the new iPad as the Free Software Foundation has already done that for me and then some.  Instead, I want to concentrate on a number of assertions made by Steve Jobs during the iPad unveiling event.  In particular, Jobs made a claim that a “new product area” would need to be better than both the smart phone (iPhone) and laptops (well, clearly he means Apple’s laptops) in some “key areas”.  Those “key areas” are:

• Browsing
• Email
• Photos
• Video
• Music
• Games
• eBooks

I’m not making this list up, you can watch the video yourself and at about the 7:59 mark you will see this list up on the big screen.

So, as you might guess, Jobs’ final claim is that the iPad is better at doing the above “key tasks” than both a smart phone and a laptop.  Let’s examine these claims a bit more in detail shall we?

Browsing

Frankly, it is a no-brainer to show that the iPad (and the iPhone for that matter) is not better at browsing, or providing a browsing “experience” than a typical laptop, hell I’ll put up any Netbook against the iPad any day for browsing experience.  Some bullets:

• No flash support
• One page open at any time
• No rollover-effects (because no mouse), like accessing menu items
• Cut/copy/paste still a severe pain-in-the-ass
• Browser does not have plugin support (like FireFox or Chrome)

For many Apple product drones the problems associated with the above issues have already been erased from their awareness.  For those that still retain their full reasoning capacity it’s like using a browser circa 1997.

Email

Oh come on now, seriously?  The iPad is better than a laptop for email?  On a laptop you can choose to use Web mail or from a wide variety of email clients with various combinations of ease-of-use and power.  But of course, email clients need to be able to run the the background to fetch mail.  Something that Apple outlaws (wrongly) on the iPad as well as the iPhone.  Then there is the on-screen keyboard, you know, the one without a dedicated number row.  Sucks I guess if your say, an accountant, and put lots of numbers in your messages.

Photos

Um, there is more to the world than looking at your photos forever.  At a starting price of ~$500 makes for one really expensive digital frame.  Also, what about integration with on-line photo services, like Flickr, Picasa, or on-line print providers?  Again, the iPad is far worse than a laptop for anything related to photos.  If your idea is that smushing around photos with your fingers offsets everything you lose on a laptop (or even a Netbook) then please, seek professional help.  Oh yeah, you can run the Gimp on even the lowliest netbook, so you can even (really) edit your photos, unlike the iPad.

Video

What goes for photos goes for videos.  Oh yeah, you can also really edit video on a laptop, and if you have a Mac you can get iDVD and go to town.

Music

Absolutely no better than the iPhone and clearly limited compared to any laptop or netbook.

Games

I really got angry when the issue of games came up, are the employees at Apple merely delusional to think that playing games on the iPad is better than playing games on a laptop, or are they merely slimbags for bold-face lying to people about what computers can really do?  Even if the horrid joke of doubling up the resolution of iPhone games wasn’t bad enough, do they think that even the best possible game imaginable for the iPad could even compete with say, World of Warcraft?

eBooks

Granted, this is the only “experience” that may lend itself to the iPad’s form-factor, but the iPad is considerably more expensive than a Kindle, not even in the same league for battery life or weight.  Further, many eBooks are used in conjunction with work, not merely pleasure reading.  For instance, books about programming are really useful where you can cut-n-paste examples into a code editor.

Conclusion

Compared to a laptop and most netbooks, the iPad does not live up to a single claim made by Jobs during the unveiling event, and offers only a bigger screen, more CPU horsepower, and storage over the iPhone.  It leaves off an integrated camera, microphone, audio jack, a multi-tasking UI, open application development that goes beyond the App Store, the lack of USB or even built-in flash media slots means you cannot even get photos on the thing without buying one form of lock-in (remember lock-in is a euphemism for money to business, and no, you don’t have to give into lock-in, don’t buy products that coerce you to work their way as opposed to them working your way, that is a friendly device, the iPad is not friendly) cable or another.  Or by copying/downloading photos from another source via a network or bluetooth. The iPad is an iDud.

Now, all this said, and given the reality that I described at the beginning of this article, I still expect the iPad to be financially at least a moderate success.  Why?  Because Apple has been fertilizing the public for years now with their attractive, but dumbed-down products, and the consuming public seems to be eager for more dumbing down because look at how pretty everything is.