The trending topic at the moment is the all new Apple iPad, Apple’s latest and greatest gadget, that has stormed the world when it was unveiled this evening.

At just half an inch thick, it has a 9.7-inch IPS display, with a ‘great angle of view’, and weighs just 1.5 pounds. Users will be able to watch movies, play music and surf the web with ease. The device will also have an eBook reader to rival Amazon’s Kindle. It has ten hours of f battery life if watching continuous videos and also has one of month of standby charge. The iPad will be powered by a 1GHz Apple A4 chip, and has 16GB to 64GB of flash storage. Just like the iPhone, the iPad has a touch screen, with an almost full-size keypad; others features include WiFi, Bluetooth, speaker, microphones, accelerometer and a compass.

Here are some of the first pictures:

It’s not as big as a laptop, but it has more features than your normal smartphone and that’s where the excitement comes from.

Take a look at the features:

Safari

The large Multi-Touch screen on iPad lets you see web pages as they were meant to be seen — one whole page at a time. With vibrant color and sharp text. So whether you’re looking at a page in portrait or landscape, you can see everything at a size that’s actually readable. And with iPad, navigating through the web has never been easier, or more intuitive. Because you use the most natural pointing device there is: your finger. You can scroll through a page just by flicking your finger up or down on the screen. Or pinch to zoom in or out on a photo. There’s also a thumbnail view that shows all your open pages in a grid, to let you quickly move from one page to the next.

Mail

See and touch your email in ways you never could before. In landscape, you get a split-screen view, showing both an opened email and the messages in your Inbox. To see the opened email by itself, you just turn iPad to portrait, and the email automatically rotates and fills the screen. No matter which orientation you use, you can scroll through your mail, compose a new email using the large, on-screen keyboard, or delete messages, with nothing more than a tap and a flick. If someone emails you a photo, you can see it right in the message. You can also save the photos in an email directly to the built-in Photos app. And iPad will work with all the popular email providers, including MobileMe, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL.

Photos

With its crisp, vibrant display, and its unique software features, iPad is an extraordinary way to enjoy and share your photos. For example, the new Photos app displays the photos in an album as though they were in a stack. Just tap or pinch to open the stack, and the whole album opens up. Then you can flip through your pictures, zoom in or out, or watch a slideshow. You can even use your iPad as a beautiful digital photo frame while your iPad is docked or charging. And there are lots of ways to import photos: you can sync them from your computer, download them from an email, or import them directly from your camera using the Apple Camera Connection Kit.

Video

The large, high-resolution screen makes iPad perfect for watching any kind of video: from HD movies and TV shows, to podcasts and music videos. You can also easily move between wide-screen and full-screen with a double-tap. And because it’s essentially one big screen, with no buttons or anything to distract you, the picture fills your line of sight. So you feel completely immersed in what you’re watching.

YouTube

The YouTube app organizes videos so they’re really easy to see and navigate. To watch one, you just tap it. When you’re watching in landscape, the video will automatically play in full screen. And with its high-resolution display, the latest YouTube HD videos will look amazing on iPad.

iPod

With the iPod app, all your music is literally at your fingertips. You can browse by album, song, artist, or genre, with a simple flick. To play a song, just tap it, and the now playing screen will show the album art at full size. Then you can listen to your music with either the powerful built-in speaker, or with wired or Bluetooth wireless headphones.

iTunes

Just tap on the iTunes Store icon, and you can browse and buy music, TV shows, podcasts — or buy and rent movies — wirelessly, right from your iPad. There are thousands of movies and TV shows (in both standard and high definition), along with thousands of podcasts, and millions of songs to choose from. You can even preview songs before you buy them. And you can sync iPad with the content you already have in your iTunes library on your Mac or PC.

App Store

iPad will run almost 140,000 apps from the App Store. Everything from games to business apps, and more. And new apps that have been designed just for iPad are highlighted, so you can easily find the ones that take full advantage of its features. Just tap the App Store icon on the screen and you’ll be able to browse, buy, and download apps wirelessly, right to the iPad.

iBooks

The iBooks app is a great, new way to read and buy books.1 Just download the app for free from the App Store, and you’ll be able to buy everything from classics to bestsellers from the built-in iBookstore. Once you’ve bought a book, it’s displayed on your Bookshelf. To read it, all you have to do is tap on it and it opens up. The high-resolution, LED-backlit screen displays everything in sharp, rich, color, so it’s very easy to read, even in low light.

Maps

See more of the world with high-resolution Satellite and Street View images. You can even see topography with the new Terrain view. You can also search for a nearby business type (for example, “Restaurant”) and then tap on that business to see the route and directions from your current location.

Notes

With its expansive display and large, on-screen keyboard, iPad makes jotting down notes easy. In landscape mode, you get not only a note-taking page but a list of all your notes. It even circles the current note in red. So you can see where you are at a glance.

Calendar

iPad makes it easy to keep on schedule by displaying Day, Week, Month or List views of your calendar. That way, you can see an overview of a whole month, or the details of a single day. iPad will even show multiple calendars at once, so you can manage work and family calendars at the same time.

Contacts

The Contacts app on iPad makes finding names, numbers and other important information quicker and easier than ever before. A new view lets you see both your complete contact list, and a single contact, simultaneously. Need directions? Just tap on an address inside a contact and it’ll open Maps.

Home Screen

The Home Screen gives you one-tap access to everything on iPad. You can also customize your Home Screen by adding your favorite apps and websites, or using your own photos for the background. And you can move apps around to arrange them in any order you want.

Spotlight Search

Spotlight Search allows you to search across iPad, and all of its built-in apps. Including Mail, Contacts, Calendar, iPod, and Notes. It’ll even search apps you’ve downloaded from the App Store. So no matter what you’re looking for, it’s never more than a few taps away.

And if those features don’t blow you away, check out the design specifics:

LED-backlit, IPS Display

The high-resolution, 9.7 inch LED-backlit, IPS display on iPad is remarkably crisp and vivid. Which makes it perfect for web browsing, watching movies, or showing off photos. It’s also been designed to work in any orientation — portrait or landscape. And because it uses a display technology called IPS (in-plane switching), it has a wide, 178° viewing angle. So you can hold it almost any way you want, and still get a brilliant picture, with excellent color and contrast.

Multi-Touch

The Multi-Touch screen on the iPad uses the same revolutionary technology that’s in an iPhone. But for iPad, the technology has been completely reengineered for the larger surface, to make it extremely precise and responsive. So when you’re zooming in on a map, flicking through your photos, or deleting an email, iPad responds with incredible accuracy. And it does just what you want it to.

Thin and light

One of the first things you’ll notice about the iPad is how thin and light it is. The screen is 9.7 inches, measured diagonally. So overall, it’s slightly smaller than a magazine. And at just 1.5 lbs and 0.5 inches thin,1 it’s easy to carry and use anywhere. There’s also a slight curve to the back. Which makes it easy to pick up and comfortable to hold.

Up to 10 hours battery life

To maximize battery life, Apple engineers took the same lithium polymer battery technology they developed for our notebook computers and applied it to the iPad. As a result, you can use iPad for up to 10 hours while surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching videos, or listening to music

Wireless

With built-in 802.11n, iPad can take advantage of the fastest Wi-Fi networks. And it’ll automatically locate available Wi-Fi networks, which you can easily join with a few simple taps. iPad also comes with Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR, which lets you connect to devices like wireless headphones or the Apple Wireless Keyboard.

3G

iPad will also be available in a 3G model, with super-fast data speeds up to 7.2 Mbps.3 So if you’re traveling, or you happen to be somewhere that doesn’t have a Wi-Fi network, you can still get a fast connection for surfing the web, downloading email, or getting directions.

Performance – Apple A4 chip.

The A4 chip inside iPad was custom-designed by Apple engineers to be extremely powerful, and yet extremely power efficient. So the performance is unlike anything you’ve ever seen on a touch-based device. Which makes iPad fantastic for everything from productivity apps to games. But at the same time, the A4 chip is so power efficient that it helps iPad get up to 10 hours of battery life on a single charge. And iPad is available with a choice of 16, 32 or 64GB flash storage.4 Which gives you lots of room for your photos, movies, music, apps, and more.

Connectivity

The 30-pin dock connector on the bottom of the iPad allows you to dock and charge it. It also lets you connect to iPad accessories like the Camera Connection Kit or the Keyboard Dock.

Audio

The powerful, built-in speaker produces a full, rich sound. Which makes watching a movie or listening to music even more enjoyable. It also comes with a headphone jack and a built-in microphone.

Accessories

There are lots of great accessories that have been specifically designed for iPad. The Keyboard Dock, for instance, is a dock with a full-size keyboard. There’s also a standalone Dock. And because iPad has built-in Bluetooth 2.1, it’ll work with an Apple Wireless Keyboard, too. There’s also a Camera Connection Kit that lets you import photos from a camera or SD card. There’s even an iPad Case that not only protects it, it also allows you to use iPad in various positions, to make it easy to type, look at photos, or watch movies. And through a range of accessories, iPad can output to TVs, projectors and displays..

Here’s a video demo:

Interested in applications?

140,000 apps. And counting.

The iPad will run almost all of the apps designed for the iPhone. You just download them from the App Store. Or, if you already have apps for your iPhone or iPod touch, you can sync them to iPad from your Mac or PC. Then you can run any of those apps in either their original size, or you can expand them to fill the screen. And developers are working on new apps designed specifically for this amazing new device and all the things it can do.

If you tap on the App Store icon, it’ll take you to a special section of the Store that has apps specifically designed for iPad. You can also browse through iPhone and iPod touch apps, including entertainment apps, productivity apps, social networking apps, games, and more. And you can buy and download them wirelessly, right from the iPad. No matter what you need, there’s bound to be an app for it.

The iWork productivity applications that people know and love on the Mac — Keynote, Pages, and Numbers — have been completely redesigned for iPad. So you can create incredible presentations, word processing documents, and spreadsheets by directly touching the words and images on the large, Multi-Touch screen. And each of these apps has been designed specially for iPad, with completely new features. So while they’re simple and easy to use, they’re also the most powerful productivity apps ever built for a mobile device. They even import iWork ’09 and Microsoft Office documents and allow you to send in iWork ’09 and PDF formats. And because Keynote, Pages, and Numbers will be sold individually on the App Store, you can purchase them all at once, or add them to your iPad over time.

The Apple iPad will be retailing for $499.00 and will be shipped to any country, so if you’re in South Africa, it’ll cost you just under R4,000.00! Damn, that’s cheaper than an iPhone?! If you’re interested in knowing when the iPad will be available, you can use Apple’s Notify me service.