From MacWorld:
http://www.macworld.com/article/1459...uncement1.html
Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad today. Positioned between a smartphone and a laptop, the tablet does many of the same things as the iPhone, but on a bigger, more easily viewed screen.
Steve Jobs shows off Apple’s iPad on Wednesday.
Demonstrating the iPad at an event in San Francisco, Jobs showed how it could be used for e-mail and Web browsing, viewing photos, managing calendars and contacts, listening to music, viewing video, and more.
The iPad is a half-inch thick, weighs 1.5 pounds, and has a 9.7-inch LCD screen. It's run by a custom-made 1GHz CPU, and comes with 16, 32, or 64GB of flash storage. For connectivity, it has 802.11n, WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1. Jobs claimed it will get up to 10 hours of battery life.
In addition to the built-in Apple apps, the iPad will also run third-party software. Senior Vice President Scott Forstall said that the tablet will run most existing iPhone apps unmodified, right out of the box. Those apps can run at their existing size in a black box or can be doubled to run in full-screen mode.
Apple is also making a software development kit available to developers, to help create apps specifically for the new device. To demonstrate what vendors could do with those tools, Forstall introduced representatives from Gameloft, Electronic Arts, the New York Times, and MLB.com to show off iPad apps they'd already built.
Jobs also introduced a new app, called iBooks, to manage e-books on the iPad. While crediting Amazon for its pioneering efforts with the Kindle, he announced that Apple was opening its own e-book store for the iPad. He said that Penguin, Harper-Collins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and other publishers were already signed up to supply titles. Those titles will use the ePub format—an open e-book standard.