After watching Steve Jobs’s keynote launch of the iPad on 27 January 2010, my reaction was. “Steve I think you have just made your first major flop since returning to Apple.”

It seems that I was wrong! The first weeks sales were amazing, 450 000 Ipads sold, 600 000 iBooks sold, 3.5 million apps downloaded. Those figures are amazing in anyone’s books.

My obvious next question is, why? My first impressions of the iPad (I have not used one since they are not available in South Africa yet) is that it is nothing more than an oversize Ipod touch. Many call it an oversize iPhone but you can’t make phonecalls with it. It does not have a camera either so it can actually do less than an iPhone. You can’t view any flash media on the internet with it and with the amount of flash websites on the internet, that means you cant view the entire web. It runs on the same O.S. as the iPhone and the iPod Touch, so the iPad should not be able to do anything that the iPod Touch or the iPhone can’t do.

Is this a great product? Or is it selling because of the Apple phenomenon happening at the moment? It does seem that you can stick an Apple badge on a dead cat these days and you would be able to sell it.

Don’t get me wrong, Apple makes amazing products, I’m an Apple Man myself. I’ve been using smartphones since the very first one’s were launched in the late 90’s. After using an iPhone for the first time, I simply could not wait to replace my own smartphone with an Apple iPhone. Their approach to the needs of mobile phone users made this device 100 times better than anything I have ever used, and I have owned a lot of different smartphones.

I just cant help but feel when it comes to the iPad, that loyal Apple followers might be blinded by the light.

Is the iPad really as great as the sales statistics will have us believe, or is the Emperor not wearing any clothes, an nobody wants to make the call?