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.
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, and viewing video.
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. For more on the iPad specs, see our article: iPad Specs: What Apple Announced (and What We Still Don't Know)
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, and the New York Times to demonstrate iPad apps they'd already built.
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