For those of you who have been hiding under a rock for the past six months or for those point-blank refusing to read anything to do with Apple’s tablet for fear of reading only accentuated fan-boy commentary or demeaning Cupertino-hating slander, Apple released their latest product, the iPad yesterday. As an Apple enthusiast watching the event and promotional videos and revelling in the photographs surrounding the launch was utter bliss, however in the midst of all the corporate propaganda and technical wizardry this Apple sympathiser partially lost his objectivity.

The ability to consider anything objectively from a variety of standpoints is something that takes a lot of practice, and is something I have, over the course of scientific and legal studies begun to pride myself on. What I wrote and said yesterday and indeed today weren’t a demonstration of this.

I am a huge Apple fan, I truly believe that the iPhone is the best phone on the market and feel I could comfortably justify that if required and whilst I concede that Macs are expensive I also believe that their price is justified as a result of incredible first party software stability and ease of use. Since owning a Mac and an iPhone my life has been made exponentially easier. Its a subjective love that encompasses an objectively sound argument. Further, my interest in business has lead me to marvel at the work Steve Jobs has done, not jut at Apple but as CEO of Pixar and the largest individual shareholder of Disney. The man single handedly pioneered Apple, projecting them to a point at which they are near untouchable in the technology market as a result not only of a great and innovative product line but incredibly persuasive and relevant advertising. Apple stands today, a company with cash in the bank to the tune of nearly $40 billion dollars, owing not a penny to any creditors, an unprecedented feat for any company, never mind a technology company.

That said, reflecting on yesterday’s product launch this evening, it dawned on me that without realising it, I had become a fan-boy. Not because I would support any product Apple brought out or because I was blind to any faults in their offerings, but because I regarded the company so highly from other standpoints that I can say with confidence that my objectiveness was clouded.

With regards the iPad, let me start by saying that I do very much like the product and I like the pricing even better. I believe it is a powerful and technologically advanced device priced extremely competitively. For the money, the iPad is not only a thin, lightweight and powerful entertainment device, its also made by Apple, and I stand in the face of anybody who can look at an Apple product across their lineup today and call foul on any attestation of unattractive. Apples cynics the world over will rejoice in my claim to enjoy the company’s products’ aesthetics but for all their beauty, when you buy an Apple product you also get a build quality so very rarely replicated across the technology marketplace.

Not only is the iPad attractive, it is also based on the incredibly successful platform that is the iPhone OS and whilst many will claim, I now included, that this serves as one of the products biggest drawbacks, Apple had no choice but to use this platform in order to ensure a cost effective product and consequently guaranteed sales. Consumer activists will cry out that Apple hasn’t provided a platform on which this device can excel and that the consumer has been let down by an under developed operating system which preys on consumer loyalty to brands, but the fact is commercial reality dictates this. The consumer and business must run side by side and consumer that thinks any product they buy is being supplied in its current state because thats the best technology on offer at the best price is deluded.

Software development, specifically in the development of a new operating system costs multiple times the amount that hardware development does. Apple had two choices when launching the iPad, make it powerful and build a custom OS from the ground up, costing literally hundreds of millions of dollars in the process, passing on this cost to the consumer and ultimately jeopardising its own financial wellbeing, or releasing the iPad on an existing platform, keeping costs low and ensuring the satisfaction of the frugal masses. For a company with so few products at market, that is currently so successful, taking huge risks is not an option. That is not how Apple made it to where it is today and that is the commercial reality any consumer activist should consider before tearing the technological prowess of the device to pieces.

That said, this article was not meant to focus on vindicating the iPad, but instead on searching through the fog to reveal an objective analysis of the device. Having had some time to consider the iPad, taking the time instead to assess what this device is and where it falls in the market I quickly came up with several rather prohibitive deal-breakers that will prevent me from buying the first generation of this device.

1. Complete and continued lack of flash support. For a device which is meant to be the best way to view the internet, excepting none, the lack of flash support immediately renders this claim null and void. Over 70% of videos and 75% of games available on the internet today run on flash and with media content shifting ever progressively towards video and interactive media, any device that wants to expand the frontiers of technology has to enhance what is currently the standard. Please don’t confuse this for any sort of support for the flash platform, in my opinion its an outdated technology which should and hopefully will be surpassed by the technically superior Silverlight which will in turn hopefully be made obsolete as developers harness HTML5. Nonetheless, that changes nothing, flash is the current, pervasive and tenacious norm, which, unsupported renders any internet-centric platform handicapped.

2. A 4:3 aspect ratio screen. If the iPad wasn’t born to play video, no device in the world was, but the choice of a 4:3 resolution takes an otherwise beautiful and technologically exceptional screen and instead greets it with huge black borders as your sliver of video sits in the middle of the screen. Very, very few videos are now shot in 4:3, 16:9 is now the norm, and many videos, especially those in high definition are now adopting even wider aspect ratios. Even many of those films now on the iTunes store are skewed positively in the wider than 16:9 range. I understand why Apple chose a 4:3 screen wishing the device to be an e-reader and internet content reader, but a widescreen display wouldn’t have taken much away from these capabilities. Instead, one function many people will certainly use this device for, watching films and TV shows has been crucified.

3. No front-facing camera. Simple enough, the iPad could have been an incredible business solution with this fantastic email client, iWork suite and brilliant calendar. One thing businesses around the globe would have eaten up is a front facing camera and iChat. I’m not going to address iChat here because undoubtedly that’s coming in iPhone OS 4.0 but without a front facing camera, conference calling using iChat’s excellent interface is a no no. Goodbye business customers.

4. iBooks. The e-reader market is currently saturated, or will soon be with e-ink devices offering excellent screens with 100s of hours of batter life for reading books at your leisure. E-ink was designed to replicate the experience of reading a book and no backlight means no iStrain (get it?). The iPad has an LCD display which carries 10 hours of charge and will provide an unrivalled sense of eye pain in the face of such a crisp display. An e-book reader this is not and Apple’s attempt to market it as such will be quickly overshadowed by other devices. Sure, the fact that the iPad is price alongside the Amazon Kindle DX should be an absolute no brainer for any tech enthusiast as as far as bang for buck is concerned the iPad is the run-away winner, but still, an e-book reader it is not.

Overall, the iPad is a nice device, its competitively priced, its made by Apple, it will provide access to content that other platforms can only dream of via the App Store and with iPad specific Apps making their way onto the store from today the possibilities are nearly endless as has been demonstrated by the iPhone and iPod touch. However, as someone kindly pointed out to me, alongside many, many other commentators, apart from being bigger, what does the iPad do that the iPod touch doesn’t? Sure it provides a much better platform on which to create documents and, its greater power will mean the new Apps should change this stance, but it does nothing groundbreaking. Then again its not priced as a groundbreaking product, far from it.

The basic model iPad is priced around the same mark that the iPod Touch was when it first launched which gives you an idea of how great value for money this device is. If the pricing is replicated in the UK you should be able to pick one of these up for less around £350, which in terms of the technology it offers really isn’t to be grumbled at. Considering its downfalls however, its poor e-book implementation, lack of flash and 4:3 ratio count this sporadic fan-boy out. I have always hated fan-boys and having now experienced a snippet of it myself, I won’t be sucked in again. If i ever buy an iPad it will be because I can objectify it, not because the promotional video gave me goosebumps.

(Hugs MacBook and iPhone and goes to bed)