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Apple's Wednesday press conference, where we'll likely see an Apple tablet, is shaping up to be the Cupertino, California, company's most-anticipated event ever.

The Jan. 27 event, titled "Come see our latest creation," will likely be marked down in history as the sequel to Steve Jobs' legendary keynote at Macworld Expo 2007, where the CEO introduced the iPhone. The iPhone, then touted by the CEO as "three revolutionary products," has grown to encompass more than 100,000 apps, giving birth to a new digital frontier and, in many ways, reshaping the cellphone industry.

Now Apple must meet, and perhaps exceed, the wow factor of the mobile marvel with its bigger sibling – a touchscreen tablet that the company has been developing for several years.

Rumor has it that Jobs has even said the tablet "will be the most important thing I've ever done."

He has his work cut out for him. For decades, sci-fi movies have dreamed of a slate-like computing device replacing traditional PCs. Many companies have tried, and failed, to live up to these visions. Thanks to clunky user interfaces, durability issues and limited utility, the tablet has been filed away as a niche device again and again. But Apple, the leader in industry and interface design and master of innovating content distribution, could be the company to finally nail the design.

Could it save the publishing industry, reboot education and maybe even change the way we treat medicine? After years of speculation, we'll finally get some answers.

Yours truly will live-blog Wednesday's event right here, so bookmark this page. Wired magazine editor Mark McClusky and GameLife editor Chris Kohler will contribute commentary on the event, with photography by Jon Snyder.

The keynote, which takes place at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center, kicks off 10 a.m. Pacific. Stay tuned and look for updates to this post, or follow @bxchen and @gadgetlab for real-time news nuggets via Twitter.

Need to catch up on tablet news? Visit our full page including our major tablet stories from 2009.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

9:20am Reporter Brian X. Chen is in line at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center. There's a long line of people awaiting admission, while TV crews jostle for space alongside the elderly Chinese ladies who practice taijiquan here every morning.

9:37am We're heading inside. Eeeeeeee!

9:55am They're playing Bob Dylan. "How does it feeeeeeeel...."

Reporters will not be allowed to take photos from their seats. They're being really militant about it, McClusky reports.

Al Gore is here. He's standing in front talking to people.



10:00am Fortunately, we have a photographer, Jonathan Snyder, on site.

The lights are dimming. The event is getting started!

Steve Jobs comes on stage. The crowd is standing and clapping.

"Good morning and thank you all for coming today," Jobs says. "We want to kick off 2010 with a magical truly revolutionary product today. But first I have some updates."

__10:07 __ He says 250 million iPods have been sold, and there have been "50 million visitors to our store."

App Store is an "incredible phenomenon," delivering applications to iPhone and iPod touch users around the world.

"We have over 140,000 apps on the App Store.

"We started Apple in 1976. 34 years later we just ended our holiday quarter, our first fiscal quarter of 2010 with $15.6B of revenue."

__10:08 __ Apple is bigger than Sony, Samsung and Nokia's mobile businesses. Apple is the #1 mobile device company in the world.

Those are the updates today.

There is a slide of Moses holding a tablet on the screen.

10:11 "Before we get to that, I want to go back to 1991. When Apple announced and shipped its first PowerBooks, this was the first modern laptop computer. Apple actually invented the first laptop computer with its Powebooks. First had keyboard and palm rests, trackball. 20 years later we have incredible laptops now. Just a few years ago in 2007, Apple reinvented the phone with the iPhone, and a few years later we got the great iPhone 3GS. So all of us use laptops and smartphones now.

"Everybody uses a laptop and or a smartphone. The question has arised lately. Is there room for a third category of device in the middle?

"They have to be far better at some key things. Better than the laptop, better than the smartphone. What kind of tasks? Things like browsing the web. That's a tall order.

"Doing e-mail. Enjoying and sharing photographs. Video, watching videos. Enjoy your music collection. Playing games. Reading e-books.

"It has to be better than these kinds of tasks otherwise ithere's no reason for being.

"Some people have said it's a netbook. the problem is netbooks aren't better at anything.

"They're slow, they have low quality displays, they run old PC software."

10:12 "We've got something better, and we'd like to show it to you today. It's called the iPad."

He's holding an iPad. It looks like all the rumor reports said. 10-inch iPhone with a silver back.

Very thin.

10:14 "What this device does is extraordinary. You can browse the web with it. It is the best browsing eperience you've ever had. It's phenomenal to see a whole web page right in front of you that you can manipulate with your fingers. Way better than a laptop, way better than a smartphone.... It's a dream to type on.

"Got some great slideshows built in.

"Built in: a calendar, month's activities. Built in: a great address book for your contacts. Has a great Maps application.

"Satellite view, (you can) zoom in on things.

"And of course we have the iTunes Store. Built right into the iPad, so you can discover it, purchase movies, podcasts, iTunes university, everything built right into the iPad.

"It's awesome to watch TV shows and movies.

"That gives you a little overview of what the iPad can do."

10:20 "It's so much more intimate than a laptop and so much more capable than a smartphone with this gorgeous, large display."

He's scrolling down the New York Times website.

It looks just like Safari mobile but modified for a bigger screen.

Browsing through Time website. Now the Fandango website.

"The whole website in the palm of your hands."

When it flips into landscape mode it flips a lot faster and smoother than the iPhone.

"So that is browsing the web. Let's go to e-mail."

Turn it sideways, have the inbox displayed in the left. The message displays in the right in a bigger window.

Taps a map of Napa Valley. Gets a big graphical map, smooth zooming in and out.

He just opened a big virtual keyboard.

Steve is typing "Wow, we're announcing the iPad!" in a note to Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall.

10:21 Mark McClusky notes: In the web demo, you could see a broken plugin icon on NYTimes site. Does that mean there's no Adobe Flash support on iPad?

10:24 Next let's go to photos.

"If I'm on a Mac i can also get events, places and faces from iPhoto.

"Can scrub through them left to right."

You can launch a map, you can see places pinpointed with thumbnails showing pics you took there

He's showing a slideshow. Some cheesy music is playing.

The desktop is shown with a background. A dock on the bottom with iPhone icons. A desktop metaphor composed of iPhone-like icons.

He launches iTunes. New graphical interface for iTunes. Everything is tappable and pops up smoothly in a box, cover-flow style.

The iTunes Store. Built right in. Sample music, discover songs.

10:25 "And of course in addition to music I've got movies, tv shows, everything all right here, built in to the iPad."

It's got a calendar. Very fancy looking interface.

__

Game|Life's Chris Kohler adds:__ I like that he's just rushing through all of the totally obvious stuff: Yes, of course it lets you browse your photos while you play your iTunes library. Jobs crashing in a comfy chair blazing through all of the features is a clever trick; it's like you're hanging out in somebody's living room and they're showing you their new toy.

10:27 Address book.

Maps app is full screen, you can switch into satellite view. Looks like Google satellite of course. Showing the Eiffel tower.

CK: Demonstrating the map/search capability, Jobs types in "Sushi" and lands on Sushi Boat on Geary. DON'T GO, STEVE.

He's searching for food to eat. Searched for Sushi, and you can easily just find a sushi restaurant in a nearby location. Sushi Boat. Then you can view street view of the restaurant.

YouTube has a big video viewer with a menu on the side for you to scroll down search results.

Now in movies. He launches Star Trek. It opens really fast. You can scrub through easily. Standard iTunes control interface.

He's playing the movie Up.

That's an overview as to what the iPad can do. Audience is clapping.

"Watching it is nothing like getting one in your hands."

"The iPad is really thin. It's half an inch thin. it weighs just 1 1/2 pounds. That's thinner and lighter than any netbook."

Full capacitive multitouch display.

1 ghz Apple A4 chip. Their own custom silicon. 16GB - 64 GB Flash storage

16, 32 or 64 GB of flash solid state storage

Wi-Fi: 802.11n

accelerometer, compass, speaker, microphone, 30 pin connector

Battery life is 10 hours, with over a month of standby life

There is no camera, apparently.

Jobs: "iPad is arsenic free, BFR free, mercury free, PVC free, highly recyclable."

Its got an aluminum and glass enclosure.

10:35 Let's talk about the App Store.

Scott Forstall, SVP iPhone software is coming on stage.

"The App Store has been a huge success. We launched it just about a year and a half ago and already our cusotmers have downloaded over 3 billion apps, choosing from among 140,000 apps. We build the iPad to run every one of these apps unmodifiied out of the box.

Two ways: pixel-for-pixel accuracy.

"We can also automatically pixel-double and run those apps full screen."

He's showing us how it works.

10:37 Mark McClusky takes over the liveblogging here.

Game demo of ESPN Snowcross. iPhone game, running on iPad.

It's an OpenGL Game.

Can resize game on the fly to full screen, even with graphically intense game. Right out of the app store, unmodified.

But developers can modify application to take full advantage of touchscreen.

There will be an enhanced iPhone SDK to support iPad development. Releasing today.

The SDK includes an iPad simulator now.

__CK: __The idea of pixel doubling to run all of the existing games on the iPhone seems to be a good one – The demo of the ESPN X-Games Snocross game, running at full screen, looked really good.

Gameloft is coming on stage

They have 60 games on the app store that have been downloaded more than 50 million times.

10:40 Brian X. Chen back at the keyboard.

Mark Hickey with Gameloft is on stage.

Showing the game Nova. What's different about Nova on the iPad?

The size gives you a lot more flexibility [than iPhone] when controlling the game.

Slide finger across the screen to throw grenades. The iPhone gives us the ability to interact with the game in ways we couldn't possibly before.

You can turn your hand to open a door.

10:42 CK: So far, the thing that's excited me the most, as weird as this may sound, is the idea of dragging a mini-map across the screen in a first-person shooter. Touch interfaces on a big screen is something we've never seen before, and the idea of adding features that just couldn't exist before is embodied in this concept.

Next up is the New York Times. (We knew they'd be here.)

Martin Nisenholtz is coming on stage.

Jennifer Brook is the interaction designer of this application.

They've developed a new application for the iPad.

Their iPhone app has been downloaded over 3 million times and so they're doing the same thing with the iPad.

Jennifer: "We think we've captured the essence of reading the newspaper."

10:44 It just looks like the website with some fancy buttons to bookmark articles...you can save to reading list, and sync to iPhone

"We're very excited to pioneer the next generation of digital journalism. Thank you very much," Martin Nisenholtz concludes.

10:47 Next up is Brushes, the iPhone paint app.

Steve Sprang from Brushes takes the stage.

Painting application designed for the iPad.

By pinching you can zoom in. By tapping and holding you can paint or erase. If you mess up you can undo. When done painting just tap the gallery button.

10:48 Next up is Electronic Arts.

EA has been a major supporter of the iPhone platform since launch of the iPhone with over 40 titles.

Travis Boatman of EA is coming on stage.

Gorgeous 3D version of Need for Speed game.

"We're going to be able to bring all the great EA games from the App Store to this device in no time."

Game is fully touched enabled. Rotating the device uses accelerometer to emulate turning a steering wheel.

The graphics look just all right. Nothing compared to serious consoles.

10:50 Next up is MLB.com.

It's been downloaded nearly 2 million times in the App Store.

It's streamed over 60 million videos.

Chad Evans of MLB.com is on stage

We realized we couldn't just take our existing iPhone app and make it bigger. We had to update it to take advantage of the large, go

CK: Gamers will surely be scoffing right about now at the iPad's graphics capability, which is more equivalent to an amazing smartphone than a serious games console – it makes Wii look like a PS3. But that barely matters to the people that will play games on this.

Evans is demoing a baseball game. Within the same app you can switch to MLB on TV.

Forstall: We're proving the SDK today to allow developers to get started for the iPad.... That's the App story for the iPad.

10:55 Steve is back on stage.

"These guys only had 2, 2 1/2 weeks to work on these things. Imagine what they're going to do in the next few months. People are going to go crazy."

Now a slide of the Amazon Kindle is on screen

"Amazon's done a great job with pioneering e-books..." Steve says.

10:56

iBooks is the app for reading books.

(It looks a lot like Classics for the iPhone.)

Within the app you can download e-books from the iTunes e-book store.

Five of the largest publishers are on board: Harper Collins, Simon and Schuster, Macmillan, Penguin, Hachette

"We're very excited about this."

10:59 Now he's demoing the iBook app.

It's a bookshelf. It flips around to reveal the iTunes Store (kind of like a room behind a secret wall.)

Tapping a book on the shelf launches a nice, pretty-looking page. Swiping left or right turns pages.

You can change the font size if you'd like. Bigger or smaller. Change the font.

"We use the EPUB format. It is the most popular open book format in the world."

"Now something very exciting. iWork."

Exciting? iWork usually = iSnore...

11:06 Phil Schiller is showing us an iWork slide presentation.

You can tap several slides and create a bundle.

Media navigator – he's adding images, buttons. You can tap to go to the next slide, or swipe left and right.

11:10 He demonstrated Pages and Numbers. Optimized tablet interfaces, with tabs along the top. One document can hold many spreadsheets.

In Numbers you can grab an entire column with your finger and drag it to move it.

There are over 250 formulas and functions built into Numbers.

A pie chart, you can tap it and change it to a different style graph.

Charging $10 for each iWork application (not the entire suite).

OK he's done with iWork – thank God.

11:14 Steve is back on stage. Time to wake back up.

A few other things: iTunes.

The iPad syncs over USB with iTunes right on your Mac or your PC. Exactly like an iPhone or iPod Touch. When you sync, you sync everything. Your photos, your music, your TV shows, your contacts, your calendars, book marks, applications.

Backups are synced back.

11:15 "Every iPad has Wi-Fi.

"But we're also going to have 3G."

What does it cost for the data plans?

Telecom companies typically charge $60 a month for a data plan for a laptop.

"We've got a real breakthrough here. We've got two awesome plans for iPad owners. The first one gives you up to 250MB data per month. Unlimited is $29.99.

"We've got a breakthrough deal with AT&T.

"AT&T is throwing in free use of AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots."

"No contract and you can cancel it anytime.

"You can buy it right on iPad and cancel it whenever you want."

International plans will be in place by June.

"We hope to have those in place by June, so we're going to start on that tomorrow."

All the models are unlocked and use new GSM micro SIMs.

11:20 "E-mail is fantastic on this device. The best device I've ever seen for enjoying and sharing photography. Great for enjoying your music collection. And video is phenomenal. It runs almost all of the 140,000 apps on the App Store as well as a whole new generation of apps that will be designed specifically for the iPad. And the new iBooks application, with the iBooks store, you can carry literally thousands of books around on your iPad. And the iWork suite with the best interface we've ever seen."

"What should we price it at? We're going to price it under $1,000 which is code for $999.

"We had a very aggressive price goal because we want to put this in the hands of a lot of people. ... I am thrilled to announce to you that the iPad pricing is not $999 but $499."

Crowd is whistling and clapping.

11:22 Here are the options:

Wi-Fi only:

16GB $500

32GB $600

64GB $700

Wi-Fi + 3G:

16GB $630

32GB $740

64GB $830

It'll be shipping in 60 days; 90 days for 3G models.

CK: Hmm, two models: one with just Wi-Fi, one with Wi-Fi and 3G. Seems like they're trying to keep the base cost low.

There's a mechanical keyboard accessory. It has a connector on the back for charging. You can charge the iPad with the keyboard.

Another accessory: A cover that protects your iPad.

UPDATES (bookmark this link to go straight to the latest live updates)

11:25 They're showing a video of Apple employees talking about the iPad

"It's going to change the way we do things every day," Phil Schiller says in the video.

"It just feels right to hold the internet in your hands as you're surfing it." (Can't we do that already?...)

The virtual keyboard is the same size as a physical keyboard, the video says.

11:30 "Developers will be developing apps specifically for the iPad so there's going to be a whole new gold rush for app developers," Forstall says in the video.

"This multitouch is the largest we've ever built in a product," another Apple employee says.

You can share the device with someone else because they can view it off-angle.

Phil is talking about the price. "We wanted to take advanced technology hardware and software and do anything we could to get it in as many hands as possible."

Steve: "Do we have what it takes to establish a third category of product? An awesome product between the iPhone and the MacBook? The bar's pretty high, and it has to be better at doing some key things, like these. We think we've got the goods. We think we've done it. We're so excited about this product.

"We've shipped 75 million iphones, Over 75 million people who already know how to use the iPad because they've used the iPhone.

"Over 12 billion downloads for iTunes.

"We are ready for the iPad.

"The iPad is our most advanced technology in a magical revolutionary device at an unbelievable price."

"We think this is going to be a really great combination."

More from Steve: "We've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts. To be able to get the best of both, to make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view that also have them be intuitive, easy to use, fun to use.

"It's the combination of these two things that I think has let us make the kind of creative products like the iPad.

"We've got a hands-on area next door, we'd like you to go get your hands on the iPad."

He thanks us for coming; we're done

And that's a wrap. Thanks for joining us for this liveblog!