Watch out for those glowing iPad reviews

So many effusive and uncritical reviews of Apple’s admittedly impressive  iPad came out yesterday — appearing everywhere from the entirety of the Charlie Rose show to the cover of Newsweek — that some of them need a review of their own.

The main flaw in many of these reviews is simple: They portray the iPad not as a casual content consumption device, a function it serves quite well, but as a veritable replacement for the traditional computer. And, likely because they hope the iPad will reignite consumer interest in their content, many publications gloss over the device’s major limitations and omitted features to arrive at the misleading conclusion that the iPad is a viable alternative to the laptop.

Take, for example, highly paid Respectable Technology Columnist Walter Mossberg’s lengthy look at the iPad, which was published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal and on his Web site. In the second paragraph of his review, Mossberg briefly lists some factors that might prevent the iPad from being a “viable” laptop replacement:

“The iPad lacks some of the features—such as a physical keyboard, a Webcam, USB ports and multitasking—that most laptop or netbook users have come to expect.”

The big problem is that multitasking has been an indispensable feature of laptop computers for decades. It’s not just an irritating omission; it’s what lets you listen to Pandora online radio while writing a text document, it’s how you can chat on an instant messenger while you flip through your favorite Web sites, and it’s how a businessman can watch stocks while talking with his clients.

Despite the lack of this basic functionality, Mossberg’s article, which Apple is already quoting on its sales pages, goes on to call the iPad “pretty close” to a “laptop killer.” He also appears in a video on his Web site brazenly calling the iPad a “general purpose computer” and “not just a big iPhone.”

A device that can’t properly open two third-party programs at once is a full-fledged “computer” that’s “pretty close” to reducing ordinary laptops to obsolescence?  There’s an overstatement in there somewhere.

We got our hands on Apple’s tablet today, and we’re inclined to agree with David Pogue: typing on this thing is frustrating if you’re trying to do anything more than send off a quick email or two. No one, despite what Mossberg told Charlie Rose last night, will be writing anything substantial, much less a term paper, on this thing. Students can also forget about using the iPad as a reliable note-taking device.

Even the $69 physical keyboard add-on, available now through the Apple Store, isn’t much relief because, for now at least, you’re still stuck with using Apple’s limited “Pages” word processor on the iPad. It’s a far cry from Microsoft Word or Apple’s desktop word processing software, both in terms of usability and general compatibility. We emailed a document we made with the iPad’s “Pages” software to our laptop computer, which runs Microsoft Office 2007, and found that the formatting somehow changed during the transfer.

While you’re free to load up your iPad with as many text documents as you please, good luck adding bigger media files to the gadget. Mossberg’s Journal review fails to reference even in passing the small size of the iPad’s flash-based hard drive, which is far outclassed by virtually all widely available “general purpose computers.”

For $499, Apple blesses you with a dismal 16 gigabytes of flash memory storage, which is only enough for a handful of movies and photos. Even many of Apple’s iPod devices, which are intended just for music playback, boast just as much, if not more, storage space. Apple’s iPod Classic line, in fact, features 160 GB of room.

For the sake of comparison, the first netbook we found on Amazon – a $366 Eee PC – provides a 2.5″ 250 GB hard drive. What’s more, you’re free to expand the drive at any time if you fill it up. Just pop open the netbook and throw in a replacement drive.