At today’s special event in San Francisco Steve Jobs announced the highly anticipated Apple tablet computer, the iPad. It has a 9.7″ display, is 0.5″ thick, weighs 1.5 pounds and has a 10 hour battery life. It comes with WiFi, Bluetooth, an accelerometer, compass and can run existing apps from Apple’s App Store without any additional modification.

Pricing for the iPad starts at $499 for 16GB and it will be shipping by March. An unlimited data plan is being offer via AT&T at $29.99/month with no contract or $14.99/month for up to 250MB. A keyboard dock is also available.