It didn’t take long: someone has covered an iPad with diamonds.

It was inevitable, really — sadly, almost no product is immune from being smothered in diamonds.

We’ve reported in the past on diamond iPhones, diamond cakes, and even a diamond Wii; now it’s the turn of 2010′s must-have (or otherwise…) gadget: the iPad.

This sort of thing is done all too often.

Perhaps the manufacturers will sell a few of these and make some money, more likely I think they won’t sell any (at $20,000), but I suspect that this isn’t meant to lead to sales of diamond-encrusted iPads, but to lead to headlines and a PR result for the company behind the blinged-up object.

I can’t imagine that the people at Apple think this is a good thing; we all know that Apple are obsessive about design, and I very much doubt that they think this improves their precious object.

And I really don’t think that this does much for the way that diamonds are perceived.

But perhaps on very narrow PR terms, this is a success: it did lead to a flurry of stories about diamond covered iPads, and the manufacturer got a mention in most of them (I won’t give them the publicity).

Of course the makers of the diamond iPad might not expect to sell many of them, or value the PR that is generated. Rather, they might have a more noble ambition: to have created a work of art.

They might believe that covering an iPad with diamonds is a vital piece of commentary on the timeless beauty of a diamond juxtaposed with the disposable transience of a consumer electronics device. It might be a satirical statement on the bling culture of today’s consumerist society.

But I doubt it.

Covering objects with diamonds can be done with a measure of wit and style, as demonstrated by Damien Hirst when he come up with ‘For the love of God‘, below.

What’s the difference?

Well, it’s mostly about the object being diamond encrusted. A skull is an unlikely and surprising candidate for this treatment. Although the original skull was replaced by a platinum replica, the fact remains that a skull is organic, a natural object, and of course it’s human, so it’s ‘wearing’ diamonds, echoing what we do as people in a show of vanity or wealth or beauty or success or whatever.

‘For the love of God’ plays with the contrast between a macabre, gothic object such as a skull, and one of the most glamorous objects of all -  a diamond.

Hirst is probably making some sort of joke about death: it could almost be captioned or subtitled ‘You can’t take it with you‘.

So there seems to be something to say about Hirst’s work even if we don’t think much of it as a work of art (although I think it is genuinely beautiful), but there’s almost nothing to say about an iPad covered in diamonds. It’s a gimmick dreamt up by a salesman, not an artist.