<\/p>\n
\nQ:<\/strong> What do you think of the tablet PC?
\nJobs:<\/strong> We\u2019re not sure the tablet PC will be successful. It\u2019s 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\u2013we just don\u2019t know whether it will be successful.\u201d<\/p>\n\u2013Apple CEO Steve Jobs, International Herald Tribune, Sept. 2002<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n\u201cThere are no plans to make a tablet. It turns out people want keyboards. \u2026 We look at the tablet and we think it\u2019s going to fail.<\/p>\n
– Steve Jobs, D: All Things Digital Conference, 2003<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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 \u201coff the charts.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
For minute-by-minute updates, see John Paczkowski’s live coverage<\/a>. We’ll update this post in a bit.<\/p>\n
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