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SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Apple honcho executive Steve Jobs emerged from scrutiny leave to show a newborn edition of the iPad designed to alter the company's grip on the palmy paper machine market.

The iPad 2 is thinner and device than the original edition free terminal assemblage and features cameras for photography, movie-making or recording chat.

"We've been working on this product quite awhile and I meet didn't want to woman a great day," said Jobs on Wednesday, appearing gaunt but energetic and was clad in his trademark long-sleeve black turtleneck and blue jeans.

Jobs, 56, who went on scrutiny leave in Jan for an some illness, was met with a stagnant ovation as he walked on initiate at the Yerba Buena Theater to introduce the next-generation iPad.

"We think 2011 is understandably feat to be the Year of iPad 2," he said.

The cyberspace had been noisy for chronicle with speculation over whether Jobs, the profession visionary behind the iPhone, iPod, iPad and Macintosh computer, would attain an appearance.

Apple shares surged after he turned up and were 0.80 proportionality higher at $352.12 dollars in daytime trading on Wall Street.

The iPad 2 features front- and rear-facing recording cameras to enable recording chitchat and is thinner than the preceding version.

"The newborn iPad 2 is actually thinner than your iPhone 4," said Jobs. "It is dramatically thinner, not a lowercase thinner, a third thinner."

It weighs 1.3 pounds (590 grams), downbound from 1.5 pounds, has the aforementioned 10-hour shelling chronicle as the preceding help and module become in black and albescent versions.

"And we are feat to be shipping albescent from Day One," Jobs said in a joking meaning to Apple's continuing quality to display a promised albescent edition of the iPhone 4.

Jobs said the iPad 2 module sell for the aforementioned $499-$829 toll as the preceding model. It module board in the United States on March 11 and on March 25 in 26 another countries including France, FRG and Japan.

Jobs said the iPad 2 is "dramatically faster" cod to a newborn A5 chip. "The graphics in this thing are wonderful," he said.

Apple sold nearly 15 meg iPads between April and Dec generating nearly $10 billion in revenue.

"We've never had a product that got soured to that alacritous a start," Jobs said. "We impact 90 proportionality of the market.

"Our competitors were meet flummoxed," he said. "They went backwards to their art boards, tore up their designs."

"I'm very impressed," Gartner shrink Van Baker said in a shack where grouping were getting hands-on instance with iPad 2 tablets. "The hardware is as beatific as anything added in the mart and the code meet buries the competition."

By keeping the iPad 2 at the aforementioned toll as its predecessor, Apple is "nailing it," according to the analyst.

The iPad 2 offers iMovie recording redaction software, music making flat GarageBand and "Hot Spot" code that lets tablets admittance the cyberspace by synching wirelessly to iPhone smartphones with medium connections.

Rival manufacturers impact been scrambling to bring their own paper computers to mart since Apple introduced the iPad terminal year.

Overall sales of tablets, which crapper be utilised to wave the Web, read electronic books, check recording and more, are prognosticate by Gartner to impact 55 meg units this year.

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this assemblage was rife with gadget manufacturers display soured tablets which they were racing to intend into a mart set aflame by the iPad.

Motorola Mobility's Xoom, which went on understanding terminal week, is the prototypal paper supercharged by Honeycomb code crafted specifically for much devices by cyberspace worker Google, and has been heralded as a viable challenger to the iPad.

Another rival, South Korea's Samsung, has declared plans to become discover with a large-screen edition of its Samsung Galaxy Tab also supercharged by Honeycomb.

Jobs also declared weekday that Random House would be making 17,000 electronic books available for Apple's iBook store, connexion another field publishers.

Jobs, who underwent an activeness for pancreatic cancer in 2004 and conventional a liver transplant in primeval 2009, went on indecisive scrutiny leave on Jan 17, turning over day-to-day operations to honcho operative tar Tim Cook.

Jobs ended the circumstance by sharing ground he thinks iPad module trounce the competition.

"A aggregation of these folks in the paper mart are rushing in and hunting at this as the incoming PC (personal computer)," Jobs said.

"Our undergo with every pearl in our embody says that is not the right approach," he continued. "These are post-PC devices that requirement to be more intuitive than a PC."

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