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That or Apple is doctoring their device videos. During the keynote presentation on Wednesday, the iPad ran into several infamous blue legos of death. That means the device they were using for the presentation was not running Flash… this is not debatable. However, several sites have come to report that the promotional video of the iPad shows Flash content.

The picture to the right is from the iPad video on Apple’s website. In it, the iPad is browsing a website that displays a food ad on the left. That ad is actually Flash and could not play on a iPhone or an iPod touch.

    What does this mean? There are many different possibilities, so let’s break them down bullet style:

  • The iPad in the presentation could be an older prototype than that used in the iPad promotional video.
  • Apple may have decided that the device should not run Flash in earlier testing due to instability.
  • Apple is doctoring the iPad promotional video to make it a little less obvious that it doesn’t run Flash.
  • Apple shot the promotional video with a 4.0 alpha release that includes Flash.

The last bullet is our favorite because we all expected iPhone OS 4.0 to be released along with the announcement of the iPad on Wednesday. We expect the iPad software in the presentation was left at 3.2 and we may see Flash when it’s upgraded to 4.0 sometime in the near future. We may not see iPhone OS 4.0 until the WWDC event in June, but we don’t expect that Apple’s announcement really covers everything that this device can do. We’re also still unsure about the power of the processor: it’s 1GHz according to Apple but that doesn’t mean much. The iBook G4 had a 1GHz processor in an early revision. Could it play flash? Sort of. But one thing we can say is that the graphics power appeared to be very good and responsive during the keynote. That makes us think this device is perfectly capable of running Flash, but we won’t know until someone from the press gets to play with one and run some benchmarks.

Update:

Mac Rumors is now reporting that the New York Times actually doctored the website for Apple’s promotional video. This information comes from and undisclosed source. Take it as you will, but we tend to believe it.