After days of hype Apple launched the iPad today. I hadn’t planned on staying up to 2am to watch the launch but I did.
I could listen to the audio from the launch through Leo Laporte’s TwitTV while watching the live blogging by Engadget. The feed was slow for the first hour with lots of buffeting but eventually settled down.

So here it is the much hyped iPad. The wifi models will be shipping within 60 days and the 3G models within 90 days.

Photo copyright engadget

It does lots, looks great and I want one. I am not going to go into details of all the features as there will be lots of articles around that will give you this information.

A couple of things that I did note though were that the iPad has the same slide to open as the iphone and the keyboard is also similar to the iPhone and doesn’t have numeric above the alpha keys ( I find this annoying on the iPhone especially when suing numerics in passwords). It runs iPhone apps and the new SDK from Apple to develop apps will allow the apps to be bigger.

iPad

Photo copyright engadget

The other big question is: How much? (These prices are in USD.)

The base model 16GB will be $499, 32GB will be $599, 64GB will be $799.

The 3G models cost an extra $130

16GB is $629, 32GB is $729, 64GB is $829

So now we just have to wait and see if they are really worth all the hype and the price, hope it’s not like the mac book Air, nice to look at but not really worth the expense.