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NY Times Blogging Live about the iPad Product Announcement

Brushes App for Artists

Update | 1:57 p.m.
Brushes allows people to tinker with photos and illustrations, zoom in to images, change colors, add to images and make their own.

“Imagine an artist with a canvas this large,” says Mr. Forstall, retaking the stage and introducing game giant Electronic Arts.

The New York Times on the iPad

Update | 1:50 p.m. Next up: us, The New York Times. We’ll try not to be too self referential here.

Our colleague Martin Nisenholtz is taking the stage now. Three weeks ago, The Times came to Cupertino, Calif., to develop an application for the iPad, Mr. Nisenholtz says. “We want to create the best of print and best of digital, all rolled up into one,” he says.

“We think we captured the essence of reading a newspaper,” says Jennifer Brook, another Times colleague.

The app allows people to save stories to the device, resize text and change the number of columns, skim photos and play video. It appears to look quite a bit like the Times Reader application. “It’s everything you love about the paper, everything you love about the Web and everything you expect from The Times,” Ms. Brook says.

Third-Party Apps

Update | 1:41 p.m. To talk about third party software, Mr. Jobs introduces senior vice president Scott Forstall. The iPad will run “virtually every one” of the apps for the iPhone “virtually unmodified,” he says.

The iPhone apps can run in a black box in the middle of the screen or, by doubling the pixels — and I presume losing some resolution — fill the screen.

Games are “incredibly smooth,” Mr. Forstall says, demonstrating that Mr. Jobs’ capacity for hyperbole is one of Apple’s cultural traits.

He also notes developers can modify their apps to take advantage of the large touch-screen display, just as Apple did with its calendar, iTunes, e-mail and YouTube apps. The iPhone SDK, a set of programming tools for developers, will be enhanced to support development of the iPad, and the new SDK will be released today.

“We think its going to be a whole other gold rush for developers as they build apps for the iPad,” Mr. Forstall says.

Mark Hickey from Gameloft, a game developer, is now demonstrating Nova, their shoot-em-up, on the iPad.

10-Hour Battery Life

Update | 1:38 p.m. “We been able to achieve 10 hours of battery life” Mr. Jobs says. “I can take a flight from San Francisco to Tokyo and watch video the whole way.”

He says the iPad also has more than a month of standby battery capacity. You can leave it alone, and find it still with some charge when you come back in a few weeks.

My colleague Mr. Carr notes that there’s a long history of power hyperbole in all categories of gadgets.

The Specifications

Update | 1:33 p.m.
And now we’re going to dive into the specifications. Half an inch thin. Weighs 1.5 pounds. 9.7-inch IPS display — super high quality, great angle of views, Mr. Jobs says.

Full capacitive multi-touch screen, same as the iPhone — “super responsive, super precise,” he says.

The iPad is powered by Apple’s own custom silicon, he says — a 1 GHz A4 chip,, 16 GB of memory, 32 or 64 Gigabytes of storage.

There’s Wi-Fi, 802.11n, and the latest Bluetooth. (Apparently no 3G wireless, notes my colleague John Markoff.) Accelerometer, compass, speaker, microphone.

Video on the iPad

Update | 1:29 p.m. Mr. Jobs is demonstrating the movie “Star Trek” on the tablet.

I wonder, will people really want to hold this device, other than on an airplane, while they watch TV and movies? However, the tablet might be the perfect breakfast table companion. You can control it with one hand and don’t have to fiddle with a keyboard.

“Watching is nothing like getting one in your hands,” Mr. Jobs said.

My colleague David Carr notes that Mr. Jobs is doing little bit of cross-promotion, showing off Pixar’s “Up” movie.

Colors are crisp

Update | 1:23 p.m. Some early impressions from looking at the device on stage: It appears to have only one physical button, looks exceedingly light and thin, and the screen has great crisp colors. Mr. Jobs is now demonstrating the device’s e-mail and photo capabilities.

Mr. Jobs is now demonstrating the music capabilities of the iPad. Album artwork displays along with songs. However, you ain’t strapping this thing to your shorts as you work out.

As he demonstrates the tablet’s calendar, I’m thinking that we have yet to see any significant differences between the iPad and the iPod Touch, other than its size.

Mr. Jobs is now showing the maps app. Apple is still using Google Maps, Silicon Valley watchers. Maps includdes a nice integration with Google Earth and Street View. So you can shift from a bird’s-eye view of that sushi restaurant you are looking for to a crisp view of its front door.

Browsing the Web on the iPad!

Update | 1:16 p.m. Mr. Jobs is giving an overview: it’s very thin, with customizable background images. “You can browse the Web with it. It’s the best browsing experience you’ve ever had.”

I’m cutting out all of Mr. Jobs’s “phenomenals” and “amazings” and “incredibles,” folks. Just assume they are there.

The iPad works in both landscape and portrait mode, like the iPhone. It has a virtual keyboard, access to photo collections, direct access to iTunes’ surfeit of content.

“It’s awesome to watch TV shows and movies,” Mr. Jobs says. “It’s so much more intimate than a laptop and it’s so much more capable than a smartphone with its gorgeous screen.”

He’s now displaying the New York Times site, NYTimes.com. If he shows the Bits blog, the space-time continuum may rip. Oh, jeez, he just showed the Technology page, which has Bits on it. I just saw my own name on the screen. Audience is chuckling as they see our tech headlines.

He’s now going to Time magazine, thank God. “Did you see what’s going on today?” he quips as the audience looks at Time’s tech headlines. “A whole Web site in the palm of your hands.”

The New iPad Looks Like a Big iPhone

Update | 1:10 p.m. All of us use laptops and smartphones now. The question has arisen lately: is there room for a third category of device in the middle?

The new device will have to be far better than the laptop and smartphone at doing important things: browsing the Web, doing e-mail, enjoying and sharing photographs, watching videos, enjoying your music collection, playing games, reading e-books. Otherwise, “it has no reason for being.”

Apple’s answer: the iPad.

It looks like, well, a big iPhone, pretty much as anticipated.

Apple is a Mobile Device Company

Update | 1:05 p.m. Mr. Jobs says there are 284 retail stores. At the online App Store, there are more than 140,000 applications, which have been downloaded a total of 3 billion times.

Apple is now a $50-billion-a-year company, Mr. Jobs crows. The revenue comes from iPod, iPhone and of course Mac sales — a majority of which are laptops. All are mobile devices. “Apple is a mobile devices company. This is what we do,” he says. He calls Apple the number one mobile devices company in the world.

Now let’s get the main event, he says.

Steve Jobs Appears

Update | 1:03 p.m. Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, has taken the stage. He looks disturbingly thin, much as as he did when he took the same stage in September to introduce new iPods. But there’s a sparkle in his eye and a smile on his face as he gets a big standing ovation.

“We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a truly magical and revolutionary product,” he says. But first, there are some updates: a few weeks ago Apple sold its 250 millionth iPod.

The Event Begins

Update | 1:01 p.m. The lights are darkening here at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The Wi-Fi is unstable, endangering the tweeting and blogging of hundreds of journalists.

After remaining mum during more than two years of rumors and thousands of speculative articles and blog posts, Apple is finally ready to unveil its “latest creation” on Wednesday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco.

All signs point to the introduction of a tablet computer. Analysts and high-tech companies have long thought that such a device, at the right price and with the right technology and connections to content, could establish a new category of computing and change how people consume media. It could also bring further disruptive changes (some positive) to all sorts of industries. But tablets have flopped before. On Wednesday we’ll see if the Apple tablet is a game-changer.

I’ll be chronicling the morning’s events here as they happen, with contributions from John Markoff, veteran technology reporter, and David Carr, the Times’s media columnist. We’d like to hear any and all questions from readers and will try to answer them in our coverage.

Steve Jobs is expected on stage at 10 a.m. local time, 1 p.m. New York time, so watch this space for updates.

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