First Apple Tablet ad leaks… not

The Apple Tablet is almost upon us. Probably. This mythical device, that has been cooed over by Apple fanboys for months now, is almost guaranteed to be unveiled at the special media event on Wednesday. And the speculation and hype-mongering has now reached fever pitch.

Wednesday should signal the end of this horrible, life-sapping period of time where everyone is talking about a product that doesn’t yet exist in any real sense. Sure, there will be a whole new set of articles written about the Apple Tablet, most of which will be unnecessarily brown-nosing towards Apple and Steve Jobs, but at least they’ll be written after the event and not before.

The latest episode in this sorry episode, which has seen the device analyzed to within an inch of its life despite it not yet having been seen by anyone outside of Apple HQ, is the leaking of the first advert for the Apple Tablet. Except it doesn’t, because the ad is not real. Clearly, as plain as the nose on my face, not real.

Here is the advert, which was posted to French blog NoWhereElse.fr before being picked up by VentureBeat. Enjoy.

The problem is, of course, that it isn’t real, or anything close to real. As TechCrunch noted very quickly, a quick translation of the original text on Google would have revealed the truth, with the video cued up by the statement, “In the meantime, here’s what an advertisement might look like…”

It’s a good effort at recreating an Apple commercial. The bright colors and bold music are there to distract potential customers from the reality of the product. Not to mention the price. But the image being used is one that’s spread like wildfire for the last few months. And it isn’t what the Apple Tablet will look like in reality. Then there’s the fact it’s running Mac OS X, while the Apple Tablet is likely to be running a new version of the iPhone OS.

The strange thing is that I suspect the first real commercial for the product will look somewhat like this. Which just shows how predictable Apple is at times.

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• Steve Jobs: Apple Tablet to be “the most important thing I’ve ever done”
• Apple wants its Tablet in every home – which seems a little over-optimistic
• Diggnation cohost claims Apple Tablet will be “shockingly” inexpensive
• The world doesn’t need any more written about the Apple Tablet – so please stop
• Piper Jaffray analyst predicts Apple will make $1.2 billion in the first year from the Apple Tablet