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. 

AlsoCanaccord Genuity said its channel checks indicated very strong iPhone 4S sales trends in the US and international markets, and increased its price target on Apple's shares. 

The brokerage, which revised its price target on the stock to $665 from $650, now expects the company to sell 32.6 million iPhones in the March quarter, up from an earlier estimate of 30.1 million phones. 

"We believe iPhones are outselling all other smartphones combined at the Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon channels since the iPhone 4S launch," the brokerage wrote in a note to clients. 

The iPhone 4S was launched in early October and comes with the increasingly popular voice recognition software, Siri.

Less than a month after its launch, AT&T said it had activated a million of the phones on its network. 

The company reclaimed its top smartphone-maker tag from Samsung as its market share went up to 23 percent from 14 percent after the launch, the brokerage said. 

Canaccord now sees Apple selling 148 million phones this year, up from its previous estimate of 140 million phones.  

The brokerage said the launch of iPhone 5 could boost sales further. 

"Our checks indicate smartphone competitors have delayed smartphone launches in an attempt to avoid competing with the iPhone 4S launch and ahead of a potential iPhone 5 announcement in mid-2012," the brokerage said.