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After months of fevered rumor and speculation, Apple today unveiled a surprisingly inexpensive new mobile product that fits halfway between the popular iPhone smartphone and the company’s MacBook laptops. The Apple iPad will go on sale starting in 60 to 90 days at prices ranging from $499 to $830.

The iPad is a flat, 10-inch, color touch-screen computer that resembles a larger version of Apple’s iPhone. Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said the iPad is the best device yet for such tasks as web-browsing, e-mail, sharing photos, watching videos, enjoying music, playing games and reading electronic books. Analysts and reporters attending the announcement today stopped short of fully endorsing Mr. Jobs’s praise of the iPad, but many said their lack of rapturous adoration of the machine was at least partially the result of the unrestrained media hype that preceded its introduction.

Media executives -- newspaper and magazine executives, in particular -- have looked to the launch of the iPad as a moment that could reinvigorate their flagging businesses. Late last year, Condé Nast men's magazine GQ introduced an app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Other magazines have been working on tablet-ready versions as well, and a consortium of major magazine publishers, inlcuding Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc., is developing its own digital storefront for magazine-style content.

But there was no evidence today that the iPad would revolutionize the print or media businesses in the same way that Apple’s iPod and iTunes Store changed the music business.

A thin and raspy Steve Jobs did showcase digital versions of The New York Times, Time magazine, and National Geographic as three of the first four demos he performed on stage.

Apple did, however, announce partnerships with five major book publishers to deliver e-books through a new Apple online storefront called the iBook Store, using a software application called iBook that is functionally similar to its existing iTunes application. The publishers are Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette Book Group, formerly Time Warner Books. Jobs said discussions with other book publishers would commence "this afternoon."

"This is a terrific e-book reader, and we’re excited about textbooks as well," Jobs said, holding up the 1.5-pound iPad, which has a 9.7-inch (measured diagonally) backlighted "in-plane switching" liquid crystal display, a type of high-definition screen typically not found on laptop computers.

Jobs went out of his way to trash-talk Amazon’s Kindle, currently the most popular e-book device on the market. While the biggest version of the Kindle, the $489 DX, also has a 9.7-inch screen, its display is black-and-white compared to Apple’s high-resolution color version. The more popular Kindle 2 model ($259) has a six-inch monochrome display. Although Amazon this week announced that it would for the first time open the Kindle to software developers, the iPad, which is based on the iPhone operating system, will arrive with some 140,000 free and low-cost third-party "apps" to expand its functionality, while the Kindles are essentially limited to digital versions of books, newspapers, and magazines.

Based on a brief hands-on review of the iPad after the announcement, the Apple device seems more responsive, more versatile, and easier to use than the Kindle. The iPad also uses the latest WiFi wireless networking standards for full Internet access, and the more expensive models also come with "3G" connectivity on the AT&T wireless data network.

A big unanswered question is how Apple and its publishing partners will sell e-books through the iBook Store. Amazon has effectively set a fixed price for e-book titles at $9.99, a level that publishers would like to increase. By enabling extra features like video interviews with authors, color pictures and illustrations, and perhaps other multimedia supplements, the iPad eventually could allow publishers to argue for higher prices. The same could hold for newspaper and magazine publishers, who are desperate for new ways to entice readers to pay for digital content. For now, though, the subscription and single-copy purchase models for those digital magazines have yet to be worked out.

"We think it captures the essence of reading a newspaper," said Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of digital operations at The New York Times, as he navigated the full front page of the newspaper on the iPad’s color screen, using finger swipes and taps.

E-books sold through the Apple iBook Store will be based on the EPUB document format, an open standard. Although digital rights management -– technology to limit the ability of consumers to copy and transfer e-books -– is not currently a part of the EPUB format, there is no technical reason DRM cannot be added later.

Speculation that Apple would announce a new way of purchasing television shows, movies, and video games, which are already sold through the iTunes Store, went unaddressed. Because the iPad shares the same iPod and iPhone software model, customers can buy and download movies and individual episodes of TV shows, or purchase a "season pass" to buy all the episodes of a show. And because the iPad has the same accelerometer as the other Apple mobiles, it will play video games without the need for external controllers.

On the downside, the iPad lacks a built-in camera and microphone, and it does not support Adobe’s popular Flash software for adding video, animation and interactivity to web pages and advertisements. The lack of Flash support is expected to annoy many people in New York’s advertising and web-development industries.

Peter H. Lewis is a Knight Fellow at Stanford University and a former columnist at Fortune and The New York Times.