The rumours are old news. A million sites have been shown to have been liars. And the hype has given way to reality. The iPad doesn’t walk on water, hover like a board, or sing you sweet songs while you sleep. No, wait. It can do that last one.

For all the cries of ‘haters’ and ‘fanboys’, it’s hard to shake the thought that something about the iPad isn’t quite… perfection. Whatever you think of Apple and its products, it does a better job on the aesthetics of industrial design than anyone in the business. Keeping devices clean, simple and on target is their speciality. But the iPad seems a bit wrong for some reason.

For mine, that problem is the screen. There’s a few other niggles people are harping about (no multitasking, for one) but in the long game the screen is the most likely ‘miss’ to cause long term grief.

On the question of tasking, power, ports, services, software, or whatever else, these are easy adds. A firmware update here, a new app there, even a 2nd or 3rd gen product, and you have everything you need on almost every front.

But in the iPad context, the screen must remain a constant. Unlike a real laptop, Apple Apps are designed to suit a specific device resolution. Even moreso than resolution, the Apps are most specifically built to match a screen ratio. And the iPad’s 4:3 ratio feels like anything but ‘the future’.

In a world of HD, and on a device centred on content, it’s hard to understand why the iPad has chosen the path of traditional CRT screen ratio.

It even seems to be the main point of why the device seems to look kind of overweight.

The killer moment for this screen comes during the launch demo when a clip from the Star Trek movie was played. The device, already heavy on the black border, sends a 2.35:1 cinema ratio movie down into a very limited frame in the centre of the screen. In reality, this clip would have been playing at a resolution of 1024 x 435. That leaves 43.4% of the screen real estate unused when viewing cinema wide HD content. And isn’t watching HD content something this device was meant to excel at?

Had Apple opted for a 1280 x 720 screen, the iPad would have been looking svelte and the video content would have presented with dramatic impact. A classic LCD widescreen of 16:10 may have also been preferred, which would shift that frame to 1280 x 800 — even more appropriate for viewing web pages in portrait. That said, minimal scaling would have been required to fit any site into a comfortable portrait view at true 720p resolutions.

This feels like a serious missed opportunity. iPad resolution must now be fixed long into the future. To change resolution from here would be to change the game for those already investing in App development for the new platform. So in this new decade, Apple’s landmark tablet is running an LCD ratio most thought disappeared with the 12-inch PowerBook. (I’m not knocking that little wonder, of course. I still run one at home.)

It may seem like a less critical complaint than some, but as already noted, almost anything else can be upgraded. This screen is the iPad’s screen forever. And it isn’t the kind of screen that suggest the iPad is anyone’s perfect content device. For a company that sells a lot of stock thanks to its mastery of aesthetics, Apple seems to have settled for a screen solution that is less than exemplary.