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The long time coming, over hyped apple tablet was officially unveil today.
Featuring a 9.7 inch capacitive multi-touch LCD Display, 16GB, 32GB and 64GB configurations. There will be two main models, a Wifi model which is due to ship in 60 days and then in about 90 days a Wifi+3G model which will give you international internet access. The CPU is an Apple designed A4 1Ghz system on chip which helps the device have an amazing 10 hours of battery life.
iPad appears to be the ultimate web device with a very nice safari app giving the user full screen web browsing. Email seems like it really benefits from the larger screen allowing better control over email management. Of course it has iPod functionality built in, iPhoto like photo browsing, iTunes styled music player, and a much nicer YouTube app. Video viewing is going back to a 4:3 screen, 16:9 has the wonderful black bars above and below the motion picture. The itunes and app store appear to be a lot like their desktop counter parts, yet easy for finger use. Apple also enters the eBook business with iPad with the iBookStore. The amazing thing is it looks like a book, and you flip pages like a book. Huge amount of adjustments can be made to fonts style and sizes. Plus the Books you buy appear on a Bookshelf! Apple has always been know for their design. It creates an interesting platform for periodicals though because it means embedded media can work in them. This might actually save the newspaper industry, we can only wait and see.
Another very interesting thing is that iWork is going to run on the iPad as a fully functioning application. Letting you create presentations, documents and spreadsheets on the go, great for businessman right? Well iPad has an on screen keyboard (Portrait and landscape) which is not going to be the best for typing out long documents on luckily apple was smart and built in support for the Apple wireless keyboard as well creating as a custom dock/keyboard connector.

Continuing with apps the iPad is going to launch with over 140,000 apps it can use. How can it launch with that many apps? It can run almost any app already in existence for the iPhone, and it does it in two ways. Original size centered in the screen or scaled up to fit the screen. Plus there will be iPad specific apps, which you can start developing for in iPhone sdk 3.2 available now.
Lastly is pricing, shown above. It can get really confusing considering there are 6 different models of this thing. Its not the predicted $1000 but at a starting point slightly higher then the typical netbook its going to be interesting watching everything pan out. In a couple months I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these at the apple store and see if its going to be worth it. In the mean time I should probably start learning my way around the iPhone sdk.

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