Steve Jobs took the stage in San Francisco this morning to show the world what he has reportedly called "the most important thing I've ever done."

To no one's surprise, it turned out to be a slate-style computer and is named the iPad.

Jobs started by establishing the positioning of the new device, saying that there was room for something in between laptops and smartphones. That something, he said, had to be better at Web browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and e-books than either of the other two, or it would have no reason for being.

He dismissed netbooks as a contender because "netbooks aren't better at anything."

And with that, he held up the iPad. Before getting into the details, he showed a page from the New York Times in both portrait and landscape mode, a novel email interface, an onscreen soft keyboard, photos, calendar, address book, maps, video, Web browsing, the iTunes store, and more, with touchscreen navigation just like the iPhone and iPod Touch.

With that, he turned to describing the iPad itself. It's half an inch thick and weighs 1.5 pounds and has a 9.7-inch IPS (in-plane switching) display.

It has full capacitive multitouch, comes with 16 to 64 GB of flash storage, and runs on Apple's own 1GHz A4 chip.

For more iPad specs, see Page 2.

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The iPad comes with 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR. It's also got a speaker, microphone, accelerometer, and compass.

Jobs claimed that the device gets 10 hours of battery life, and over a month on standby.

To start with, it runs almost all of the existing 140,000 iPhone apps "right out of the box." The owner can download all their existing apps right onto the iPad.

The user gets the choice of running the app at original size, in a box on the screen, or "pixel-doubled" to fill the entire 9.7-inch display. But the iPhone SDK now supports development for the iPad, so a developer can choose to modify their app to support the device's full screen size and resolution.

Next came demos from a couple of game developers -- Gameloft, whose FPS Nova will ship for the iPad later this year; and EA, who showed off Need for Speed Shift. Also up was a representative of the New York Times, who demonstrated video embedded in a newspaper-style page; someone from Brushes, who showed off that company's painting app; and a guy from MLB.com (Major League Baseball), who showed how you could follow a game on the device and call up extra information.

Jobs returned at that point to introduce one of the most talked-about uses of the new device: as an e-book reader.

Generously giving credit to the Amazon Kindle for pioneering the field, Jobs went on to introduce iBooks and the iBook Store.

For iBooks and more, see Page 3.

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iBooks displays your library as book covers on a shelf and lets you buy books from an iTunes-like bookstore.

Apple has lined up five major book publishers as partners already: Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon&Schuster, Hachette, and MacMillan.

From there, Jobs turned to a perhaps unlikely set of apps for the iPad: new versions of the iWork suite of productivity apps.

The presentation app Keynote, the spreadsheet Numbers, and the word processor Pages were all shown with new touch-enabled interfaces adapted to the capabilities of the iPad.

In Numbers, for example, you can call up a soft keyboard with keys especially suited for entering data into spreadsheets -- the app offers several different keyboards, each suited for a different category of tasks.

The iPad versions of iWork are fully compatible with the Mac versions and appeared to have more functionality than the office-style apps currently available for the iPhone. They will go on sale through the App Store for $9.99 apiece.

So the device has WiFi, but what about 3G? And how much? And when?

For the answers to those questions, see Page 4.

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As far as wireless goes, the iPad has WiFi and Bluetooth built in, but it'll also be available in versions with 3G capability.

In the U.S., AT&T will be providing the service, but Apple has negotiated a special price for a data plan. A 250 MB/month plan will cost US$14.99, while an unlimted plan will be $29.99, including free use of all AT&T WiFi hotspots.

The plans don't require a contract; Jobs said more than once, "You can cancel whenever you want."

He promised that international data plans would be in place by June, but said that the iPad is unlocked and uses GSM micro SIMs, so it will probably work right away in countries that use that standard.

Back on the hardware side, there are also three new accessories available for the iPad: a dock for syncing and charging through the device's 30-pin connector (it also holds the iPad up at an angle, turning it into a digital picture frame); a Keyboard Dock with its own 30-pin connector for charging and an audio jack (the iPad also works with Apple's Bluetooth keyboard); and a case that protects the screen and flips over to provide a stand for the iPad.

So, how much and when?

The base iPad will be available in 60 days in three models: 16GB for US$499, 32GB for $599, and 64GB for $699. The 3G models will be out 30 days after that, at $130 more for the extra wireless connectivity.

What's missing? See "What could have been the iPad killer app" elsewhere on iTWire. And check back frequently for our other correspondents' take on the new era of computing (or not).