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By Steve, January 27, 2010 2:39 pm

From Slate.com:
SAN FRANCISCO—An Apple product unveiling is usually a bit of a letdown. That’s the downside of the company’s iron-fisted secrecy: The entire press gets so worked up that when the new device finally makes it to the stage, it inevitably seems far less grand than you’d imagined. (MacBook Air? Yawn.) But I won’t lie: I’ve been waiting for the Apple tablet for a long time, and in the moments before CEO Steve Jobs takes the stage this morning, I’m positively giddy. Rumors of the tablet’s existence go back at least to 2002; in all that time, the company hasn’t said a single solid word about it. So when Jobs finally spills the beans after about 10 minutes of wind-up, I’m floored. iPad? After all that time, you’re going to call it that, really? First, the features: It’s an aluminum-and-glass touch-screen machine that’s about the size of a Kindle. The iPad is extremely thin, and it weighs just a pound and a half. It runs on a proprietary Apple microprocessor, can hold 16 to 64 GB of data (depending on which model you get), and its battery (allegedly) lasts up to 10 hours. The device goes on sale in two months. (Apple didn’t say the exact date.) Prices range from $499 (16 GB, Wi-Fi only) up to $829 (64 GB and a 3G wireless modem). A cellular data plan through AT&T costs $15 a month for up to 250 MB of bandwidth and $30 a month for unlimited data. There’s no contract—you can cancel your data plan at any time without any fee. (When I asked an Apple rep whether iPhone owners could use the same plan for both devices, he didn’t know the answer.)