Apple has just announced that it sold over 300,000 iPads in the US as of midnight Saturday, April 3, including deliveries of pre-ordered devices to customers, channel partners and sales at Apple Retail Stores. For your reference, that’s 30,000 devices more than iPhones were purchased when they first went on sale.
Apple also announced that iPad users downloaded over one million apps from Apple’s App Store and over 250,000 ebooks from its iBookstore during the first day.
Steve Jobs in a statement said that the iPad is going to be a “game changer” (we’ll see) and added that on average, iPad owners downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their device.
The amount of iPads sold is a far cry from what analysts estimated (not unusual, but still): Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who had first – correctly – predicted that as many as 300,000 iPads would be sold this weekend, revised his numbers upward Saturday to between 600,000 and 700,000 units purchased on launch day.
BREAKNEWS iPhone OS4
Apple has just sent out invites to press inviting them to a special event on Thursday April 8 where they’ll “Get a sneak peek into the future of iPhone OS”.
The event, which obviously comes just after the launch of the iPad, will showcase the new features coming with the latest release of the iPhone/iPad operating system, giving developers time to plan for and integrate the new features into their apps. There have been rumors for months that this new update will include the ability for certain third party apps to run in the background.
Apple has been holding these developer preview events since before the App Store launched: there was one in March 2008 where the iPhone SDK was announced, and last March Apple gave a preview of the iPhone 3.0 software update. Historically (by which I mean, the last two years) these updates have been released alongside new iPhones in the summer (the iPhone 3G came out July 11 2008; the 3GS was released June 19 2009).
Published June 26, 2011
Category: Rumors, Technology, TV2.0, Web
Follow @theimagazine