san fransisco apple inc ceo steve jobs took the wraps off the highly anticipated ipad tablet and pitched it at a surprisingly low price aiming to bridge the gap between smartphones and laptops jobs who returned to the helm last year after a muchscrutinized liver transplant took the stage at a packed theater on wednesday and showed off a sleek halfinch thick tablet computer with a 97inch touchscreen the ipad can run movies games and a gamut of applications and taking on ereaders like amazons kindle apple announced a digital bookstore called ibooks that will let users buy from publishers including pearson plcs penguin news corps harpercollins and hachette book group what once occupied half your living room can now be dropped in a bag said npd analyst ned may its pulling together a variety of needs in a universal entertainment device the ipad will sell from late march for as low as 499 for 16 gigabytes of storage an extra 130 is needed to equip it with thirdgeneration wireless capability pricing is very aggressive so its pretty positive from a mass adoption perspective it was about 200 lower than what i was expecting said brian marshall an analyst with broadpoint amtech other analysts had speculated that the tablet may cost as much as 1000 shares of apple rose to as high as 21058 after the pricing news up 55 percent from their session low the stock closed up 094 percent at 20788 on nasdaq within reach of its alltime high of 21559 logged on jan 5 apple announced a data plan with att inc which appeared to have beaten out verizon wireless for the deal shares of att apples carrier partner on the iphone rose 114 percent while verizon communications inc fell about 1 percent iphonelike anticipationthe ipad is apples biggest product launch since the iphone three years ago and arguably rivals the smartphone as the most anticipated in the companys history wednesdays event follows months of feverish speculation on the web and on wall street apple hopes to sell consumers on the value of tablets after other technology companies including microsoft corp and toshiba corp have failed in recent years as ipod sales wane apple is looking for another growth engine jobs said there was a need for a new type of device that would sit between a smartphone and laptop computer and that can perform tasks like browse the web and play games if theres going to be a third category of device its going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks said the chief executive dressed in his trademark black turtleneck and blue jeans the ipad has a near lifesized touch keyboard and supports web browsing it comes with a builtin calendar and address book jobs said calling it awesome some analysts said the ipad with its multimedia bells and whistles is a tough competitor for amazons kindle but others noted that the kindle costs less 259 for the cheapest version