LIKE a latter day Moses, Apple supremo Steve Jobs has handed down a tablet, called the iPad, from on high to his faithful followers.
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But will the newly unveiled iPad tablet PC sell in biblical numbers to unbelievers as well as Apple zealots?
The iPad certainly produced thunder bolts and lightning on the web as social networking sites such as Twitter went berserk and tech blogs staggered under freak traffic loads when the online world tuned in to Mr Jobs' iPad launch in San Francisco around 5 am this morning.
The new iPad is 1.3 cm thick, weighs 0.68 kg and looks like a giant iPhone. As well as applications created for it, the iPad will run most of the iPhone's 100,000 plus applications either in a window or in a double pixel mode that fills the iPad's 9.7 inch, touchscreen display.
It will come in two basic flavours – one with 3G network capability and one without. The cheapest iPad with 16GB of memory will launch worldwide in late March for US$499 which should see it priced here at well under A$1000.
The 3G version with 16GB will go on sale in the US and some other countries in April for US$629. There are 32GB and 64GB models with and without 3G ranging up $US829 in price.
The iPad's user interface is similar to the iPhones, although the larger display allows an almost full sized touch keyboard and there's an optional dock that gives a full size mechanical keyboard. Unlike the iPhone, the iPad can run more than one app at a time and features a gruntier, 1 Ghz processor to handle the heavier workload.
Apple is relying on the iPad's ease of use and crisp, clean wide angle viewing display to carve out a whole new market.
"Using this thing is remarkable, Mr Jobs said. "It's so much more intimate and capable than the laptop."
While Mr Jobs may be right about playing around with the new iPad, the gadget's low price, timing and usefulness as an e-book reader will probably make it a success.
Apple now has its own e-book store called iBooks and has signed up five publishers including Penguin and HarperCollins. Newspaper and magazine publishers are rumoured to be in discussions with Apple about feeding their content through the iPad.
Apple's slick and useful iPhone made the crossover into a mass market hit and has racked up more than 33 million sales worldwide since it first went on sale in June 2007 as well as stirring up a whole new market in iPhone app sales through Apple's iTunes online store.
To be a mass market success, the new iPad will not only have to be as easy to drive as the iPhone but will also need to crank up its own ecosystem of fresh apps and become the viewer of choice for the emerging e-reader market.
It will also need to compete with the plethora of cheap netbook computers that have proliferated in the past two years and take on a fresh crop of tablet PCs from the likes of HP and Dell that use the much improved Windows 7 operating system.
The idea of a book-sized, easily transportable tablet PC is as old as personal computing itself and goes back to digital futurist Alan Kay’s Dynabook concept of 1968. After the iPhone launch Mr Kay told Mr Jobs that a larger screen version of the iPhone would 'rule the world.'
Many have tried and failed in the quest to produce a tablet PC that was a hit with consumers. Apple had a go in the early nineties with its Newton device that came unstuck mainly due to dicky hand writing recognition and a way too high price.
Software giant Microsoft has been plugging away at consumer success for tablet style PCs since the turn of the century but so far they have mainly ended up in business as data entry devices, especially in the health care industry.
However analysts say the tablet PC's time has come. Deloitte’s Technology Predictions 2010 report says what it calls 'net tablets', such as the iPad and offerings from other PC makers will sell in their tens of millions this year.