Jobs got the crowd roaring with glee after thanking them for attending.
“We want to kick off 2010 with a magical truly revolutionary product today,” Jobs said.
Jobs showed off the giant iPod Touch-looking device that includes the same home button and bezel around the device, which is one-half-inch thin, weighs 1.5 pounds and includes a 9.7-inch display.
iPad has a multitouch screen and comes with an1Ghz custom Apple chip called A4; it will be available with 16, 32 or 64 GB of storage.
It also has built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, accelerometer, compass and a 10-hour battery life. Also there's also one month of standby battery life, so users can leave it asleep and not use it for 30 days.
The iPad can run nearly every app unmodified from the iTunes store. The app starts in the center of the screen and the iPad can double the pixels to fill the screen.
The basic iPad models will cost $499, $599 and $699, depending on the storage size.
Apple also will sell a version with pay-as-you-go data plans from AT&T in the U.S. Two tiers of data plan will be available without contracts: $14.99 per month for 250 megabytes of data, or $29.99 for unlimited data usage.