After nearly a decade of rumors and speculation, Apple's finally unveiled the iPad. It's a half-inch thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds, with a 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen IPS LCD display, and it's running a custom 1GHz Apple "A4" chip developed by the P.A. Semi team, with a 10-hour battery life and a month of standby. It'll come in 16, 32, and 64GB sizes, and it's got the expected connectivity: very little. There's a 30-pin Dock connector, a speaker, a microphone, Bluetooth, and 802.11n WiFi, as well as an accelerometer and a compass. The device is managed by iTunes, just like the iPhone -- you sync everything over to your Mac. There's also a 3G version that comes with new data plans: 250MB for $14.99 and an unlimited plan for $29.99 a month on... AT&T. As expected, it can run iPhone apps -- either pixel-for-pixel in a window, or pixel-doubled fullscreen -- but developers can also target the new screen size using the updated iPhone OS SDK, which is available today.
Apple says there's room for a third device between the smartphone and the laptop, and that it has to be better at tasks like browsing, email, photos, e-books, and videos than both -- netbooks, says Steve, "aren't better at anything." It looks just like the leak we saw, with a large touchscreen keyboard that Steve says is "a dream to type on," and an interface that's very reminiscent of the iPhone, although it's significantly expanded and altered. The built-in apps are much more Mac-like than iPhone-like, with versions of iPhoto and iTunes that look like touch-oriented versions of their desktop counterparts. There's also some built-in location services that lets the Map app auto-locate, and the iTunes store is built-in for previewing and buying media.
