According to Jobs, the phone offers five hours of talk/video time and 16 hours when playing music.

The announcement that had been swirling around the company for months. Earlier Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal had reported that Apple would announce a cell phone with wireless service from Cingular.

But in something of a break from past keynote talks, Jobs offered no updates on the company's plans for its next operating system update. Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, is due out by midyear.

In introducing the new phone, Jobs explained that smart phones provide phone and e-mail and what he called "the baby Internet. They're not so smart and not so easy to use."

"We don't want to do these," he said. "We want to do a leapfrog product that's way smarter than these phones and much easier to use. So we're going to reinvent the phone."