Apple chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled a new touchscreen tablet computer on Jan. 27 dubbed the "iPad," calling it a "revolutionary" product between a laptop and a smartphone.
"We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary product," Jobs said at an Apple event in San Francisco.
"All of us use laptops and smartphones now," he said.
"The question has arisen lately -- is there room for a third category of device in the middle, something between the laptop and the smartphone," he said before revealing the new notebook-sized computer called the iPad.
Jobs said the device, with its nearly 10-inch (25.4-cm) color screen, is "so much more intimate than a laptop and so much more capable than a smartphone."
"We've got movies, videos, TV shows," Jobs said.
Jobs also showed off the virtual keyboard on the machine and said the iTunes music store is built into the iPad.
The iPad is half an inch thick (1.3-cm) and weighs 1.5 pounds (0.7 kilograms), he said, and will come with 16- 32- or 64-gigabytes of flash memory.
"We have been able to achieve 10 hours of battery life," he said. "I can take a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo and watch video the whole way on one charge."
Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2010
