Q: What do you think of the tablet PC?
Jobs: We’re not sure the tablet PC will be successful. It’s turned into a notebook that you can write on. Do you want to handwrite all your email? We have all the technology ourselves to do that–we just don’t know whether it will be successful.”–Apple CEO Steve Jobs, International Herald Tribune, Sept. 2002
“There are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. … We look at the tablet and we think it’s going to fail.
– Steve Jobs, D: All Things Digital Conference, 2003
At a 2007 all-hands meeting held to discuss the iPhone, Apple CEO Steve Jobs remarked on the company’s product roadmap. The machines Apple (AAPL) will bring to market in the years ahead, he said, would be “off the charts.”
This morning, Jobs made good on his word, unveiling a new multimedia tablet device called the iPad. As predicted, it’s portable gadget that’s meant to sit in between an iPhone and Apple’s laptop line. So far, Apple has been highlighting the machine’s ability to bring you audio and visual stuff — including a new way to view the New York Times (NYT), via a custom-made app, games designed by Electronic Arts (ERTS) and an iBook store supported by five major publishers, designed to rival Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle platform.
The hard facts: IPad sports full multi-touch functionality, 16-64GB flash storage, has a 10-hour battery life and one full month of standby time. It’s .5 inches thick and it weighs 1.5 pounds, with a 9.7 inch IPS display that looked quite sharp.
The standard OS X applications look and work much the same as they do on a laptop or iPhone. Using a pixel-doubling functionality, the iPad scales iPhones apps to full-screen without losing much in translation. A new iPhone SDK geared specifically for the iPad is geared toward encouraging development for the larger screen, and is being released today.
For minute-by-minute updates, see John Paczkowski’s live coverage. We’ll update this post in a bit.
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