Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) today announced the long waited Apple iPad. It resembles a large iPod touch. It is very thin (0.5inches).

Steve Jobs claims this is better than a laptop.  It looks like a nice media center for me, for people that mostly will do browsing listening to music and watch videos.

The price looks delicious $499! (but that's starting at we don't know the end with wi-fi and 3g)

I think apple has done it again made a good media unit that will compete in the netbook market, the only thing is some people still prefer the touch of a keyboard keys.

The iPAD has a website launched for it already at apple:

http://www.apple.com/ipad/

Ok it says, Wi-fi models shipping in late March, and 3G models shipping in April.

Specs that jump out:

• Remarkably Precise Multi-Touch screen (same as iPhone)
• Work in any orientation Portrait or landscape
• 178° Degree viewing angle
• 10 Hours battery life
• Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR (if you a keyboard guy you can always connect a keyboard)
• 802.11 (a/b/g/n)
• 3g up to 7.2mbps
• 30-pin docking to charge it up
• Build in speaker
• Headphone (3.5mm) and Mic jack

Size Specs:

• Height: 9.56inches
• Width: 7.47inches
• 1.5lbs (Wi-fi model) and 0.5inches thin

Display:

• 9.7 inch display
• 1024x768 at 132pixel per inch
• Finger-resistant oleo-phobic coating (does this mean I can use it with my greasy hands full of ketchup?)

Capacity:

• 16GB,32GB,64GB flash drive

Processor:

• 1GHz Apple A4

Wi-Fi 3G Model Supports the following:

UMTS/HSDPA (850,1900,2100MHZ)
GSM/EDGE (850,900,1800,1900MHZ)

I like this wide support here. Language support comes in English,French,German,Japanese,Dutch,Italian,Spanish,Simplified Chinese,Russian,Avatarian and Canadian (lame joke). When Ipad starts to sell you can be notified here.

http://www.apple.com/ipad/notify-me/

To me this will look like a big dent to netbooks. Conclusion this thing looks hot like pancakes on a frying pan. I think this is going to be a big hit to newspaper and media companies as people will not longer read physical media, but this is great for all the people that love trees as less paper will be printed, maybe in the future we could get all that junk-mail spam ads from (Sears,Wal-Mart) on our iPad.

Don't get this thing confused with a netbook, this thing will be limited to certain things. One thing it lacks is any sort of support for a flash drive or external hard drive or atleast a USB port or something at that! (USB3.0) would be killer here.

Anyways will see how this thing plays out when it hits the market.