Apple Announcement – The iPad (Tablet)

via New York Times

Here is the announcement we have been waiting for for months now, the Apple Tablet computer!  Just moments ago, Steve Jobs, the iconic mastermind and power behind the incredibly successful, and world dominating Apple.  Here is a general summary of the keynote speech via Brad Stone (who is the man, and hilarious as f**k) at The New York Times:

Mr. Jobs says there are 284 retail stores. At the online App Store, there are more than 140,000 applications, which have been downloaded a total of 3 billion times.

Apple is now a $50-billion-a-year company, Mr. Jobs crows. The revenue comes from iPod, iPhone and of course Mac sales — a majority of which are laptops. All are mobile devices. “Apple is a mobile devices company. This is what we do,” he says. He calls Apple the number one mobile devices company in the world.

All of us use laptops and smartphones now. The question has arisen lately: is there room for a third category of device in the middle?

The new device will have to be far better than the laptop and smartphone at doing important things: browsing the Web, doing e-mail, enjoying and sharing photographs, watching videos, enjoying your music collection, playing games, reading e-books. Otherwise, “it has no reason for being.”

Apple’s answer: the iPad.

The iPad works in both landscape and portrait mode, like the iPhone. It has a virtual keyboard, access to photo collections, direct access to iTunes’ surfeit of content.

Some early impressions from looking at the device on stage: It appears to have only physical one button, looks exceedingly light and thin, and the screen has great crisp colors. Mr. Jobs is now demonstrating the device’s e-mail and photo capabilities.

Mr. Jobs is now demonstrating the music capabilities of the iPad. Album artwork displays along with songs. However, you ain’t strapping this thing to your shorts as you work out.

As he demonstrates the tablet’s calendar, I’m thinking that we have yet to see any significant differences between the iPad and the iPod Touch, other than its size.

I wonder, will people really want to hold this device, other than on an airplane, while they watch TV and movies? However, the tablet might be the perfect breakfast table companion. You can control it with one hand and don’t have to fiddle with a keyboard.

Here is what we actually are waiting for:

And now we’re going to dive into the specifications. Half an inch thin. Weighs 1.5 pounds. 9.7-inch IPS display — super high quality, great angle of views, Mr. Jobs says.

Full capacitive multi-touch screen, same as the iPhone — “super responsive, super precise,” he says.

The iPad is powered by Apple’s own custom silicon, he says — a 1 GHz A4 chip,, 16 GB of memory, 32 or 64 Gigabytes of storage.

There’s Wi-Fi, 802.11n, and the latest Bluetooth. (Apparently no 3G wireless, notes my colleague John Markoff.) Accelerometer, compass, speaker, microphone.
“We been able to achieve 10 hours of battery life” Mr. Jobs says. “I can take a flight form San Francisco to Tokyo and watch video the whole way.”

He says the iPad also has more than a month of standby battery capacity. You can leave it alone, and find it still with some charge when you come back in a few weeks.

This is pretty much as we all expected, the name is a tidbit uninspired, but you have got to love the hype!