The event will be held in San Francisco, likely at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, which is Apple's preferred site for product launches, the website said.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

Apple has typically introduced the latest versions of its iPad in the first few months of the year. The current iPad 2 was introduced on March 2, 2011. The original iPad was introduced at the end of January 2010.

Apple's iPad dominates the nascent market for tablets even though deep-pocketed rivals are taking aim at the lucrative segment. Amazon.com Inc's Kindle Fire, which sells at half the cost of an iPad, has chipped away at the lower end of the tablet market.

Apple iPad tablet sales doubled in the December quarter to 15.43 million units from a year earlier.

(Reporting By Poornima Gupta)

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