国际英语新闻：Jobs Unveils Apple's iPad 2

Steve Jobs asserted Apple Inc.'s command over the hottest market in computing and demonstrated his flair as high-tech's most celebrated pitchman.

The Silicon Valley giant's chief executive, who took a medical leave of absence in January, was the surprise master of ceremonies as Apple unveiled a second version of its iPad tablet—a product that has created a multi-billion dollar business in less than a year and left rivals scrambling.

Mr. Jobs, who strode onto a San Francisco stage Wednesday to a standing ovation, showed off the thinner, faster iPad 2 in a presentation full of swipes at competitors flooding into the market. The crush of tablets includes Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.'s recently released Xoom and the forthcoming Playbook from BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd.

Apple has a more than 90% market share and "our competitors are just flummoxed," Mr. Jobs said, adding that if 2010 was the "year of the iPad," he might call 2011 "the year of the copycats."

The iPad 2, which like its predecessors starts at $499, will ship in the U.S. on March 11 and in 26 more countries on March 25. It comes with front and rear cameras—addressing an omission in the initial model—and a new Apple-designed chip that Mr. Jobs said performs standard calculations twice as fast as its predecessor and offers a nine-fold boost in graphics performance.

Many of the changes were widely expected, and evolutionary. But analysts said Apple had reinforced its edge with the sheer volume of new features, its lead in applications created for the iPad and its lower price point than some rivals; Xoom, for example, starts at $799 without a cellular service plan, compared with $729 for a comparable iPad.

"Apple moved the goal posts before most of their competitors even take the field," said Noah Elkin, an analyst at research firm eMarketer.

Mr. Jobs stressed that the new iPad was part of a growing new "post-PC" category of devices, which also includes its iPhone. The company faced a slew of skeptics when it first introduced the iPad a year ago, yet it managed to sell 14.8 million of the devices globally as of the end of 2010, generating $9.5 billion in revenue.

The tablet accelerated the growth of a large ancillary business based on software and content sales; Mr. Jobs said Apple now has 200 million accounts with customers around the world, and said software developers have made more than $2 billion from sales through the company's App Store.

The iPad has become a major force in the publishing world, and a rival to Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle. Apple said more than 2,500 book publishers have joined its iBookstore and more than 100 million e-books have been downloaded.