Steve Jobs with Apple's new iPad
Photo: Jeff Fox

iBooks is Apple's e-book app, with a bookshelf interface that looks like a physical wooden bookshelf. The new iBooks store will sell books from five large publishers, including Penguin, HarperCollins, and others, with more joining soon.

The iBooks store gives details of the book, samples, and reviews. Tap the book you want to buy, and it pops up on the bookshelf. Based on a preview, it looks like Apple is increasing prices from the standard $9.99 for e-books.

Controls pop up and disappear with a tap. Tap right and left, or drag pages to turn the page. Photos, both black-and-white and color, as well as videos, can be included in the books. Fonts can be changed or made larger and smaller.

—Donna Tapellini

Of course, with 140,000 apps in its store, it's no surprise that Apple seamlessly integrated them with the iPad. The Facebook app, for example, looks just like what you see from the app store Facebook.

Apple also showed an ESPN snowmobile racing game, purchased right off the existing app store.

The app store is loaded onto the iPad, and developers are expected to develop new games specifically for the new device.

In fact, several have already been completed. For example, GameLoft rewrote its game Nova for the iPad's bigger screen, including adding a minimap you can enlarge with your fingers, or turning your fingers around a door lock to open it.

The New York Times also has a new app for the iPad. You can save articles and read them from your iPhone, resize text, and change the number of columns you see, something you can't do with any e-book reader.

Brushes is a painting app that lets you create art using finger gestures. Art created using this app has appeared on three New Yorker covers. The iPad version has a new color palette, the same brushes from the iPhone app, a 32X zoom ability, and painting using your fingers. You can tap a replay button to watch how you painted a picture.

Electronic Arts already has 40 apps in the app store. Now it's working on games optimized for the iPad. EA's spokesperson claims it's like watching an HDTV game right in front of your eyes. Tap on the car to see the interior. Swipe your finger up and down to change gears. Tap the rear-view mirror to look behind you.

MLB.com is also working on apps for the iPad. Gameday, which lets you watch baseball games graphically, shows player stat cards, video highlights as the game goes on, box scores, field dimensions, and batter/pitcher matchups. You can also watch games live from MLB.com enhanced with many of the same features.

—Donna Tapellini

A few more details announced by Steve Jobs this morning: The iPad is a half-inch thick (same as the iPhone), and weighs 1.5 pounds. The display is 9.7 inches with IPS technology.

It's powered by a 1GHz Apple A4 chip with 16 to 64GB of storage.  The processor puts it in the same class as a fast smart phone with a snapdragon processor.  It has Wi-Fi and 802.11n.

Battery life, according to Jobs, is 10 hours with a month of standalone life.

(Full iPad specs are available on Apple's Web site.)

—Donna Tapellini

Steve Jobs demonstrated Apple's new iPad today, showing off some of the functions of the new device.

He started with a demo of Web browsing on the thin tablet device. Using touch gestures to read the New York Times, Time magazine and other sites, Jobs showed how the tablet quickly changes from landscape to portrait mode and back for easy reading and viewing.

Next, sitting on the near-empty stage, Jobs checked his e-mail on the iPad, including instantly reading PDF attachments and viewing embedded maps.

Photos show up in small images and as albums, and like with Web browsing you can easily turn from portrait to landscape. A bar at the bottom of the screen lets you quickly scroll the photos in an album. The device sorts by events, places and faces, and you can quickly set up a slide show with transitions and music. You can also use multitouch gestures to get a sneek peak inside an album.

More coming as it happens.

—Donna Tapellini

"We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary product today," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs today. And with that, he announced the iPad.

Sounds like it will be for just about everything: Tasks like browsing the web, doing e-mail, sharing photos, watching videos, enjoying music, playing games, reading e-books.

"Apple is a mobile devices company," he said. All of us use laptops and smartphones now, he added. Is there room for a third category of devices?

More details on the iPad coming!

—Donna Tapellini