Just before Steve Jobs announced the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0, he also presented some official information about the iPad, one week after it was made available. The numbers although not that impressive are interesting enough and worthy of a second look from us.
According to Apple, around 450,000 iPads were already sold. First day sales figure was officially at around 300,000 units. While the iPad was able to beat the opening weekend sale of the first gen iPhone (around 250,000), the iPhone 3G however managed to get a sale of around 1 million units when it first came out in July 2008.
The iPad 3G versions won’t be coming out until last week of April. So we don’t know yet whether it would add up to the iPad’s current sales performance, or even perhaps whether it could match up the sales of the iPhone 3G. But then, these two Apple devices are different from each other so it’s not likely that the iPad could match with the sales performance of the iPhone. And both devices have their specific target consumers as well. But we have yet to see. Perhaps there are more buyers who are waiting for the iPad 3G.
Moving on to the stats on iPad apps. Apple was proud to report that about 1 million iPad apps were already downloaded from the App Store on the first day. Right now, total apps downloaded stand at around 3.5 million.
Now here’s the more interesting bit, there were 250,000 books downloaded from the iBookstore on the first day. And this increased to 600,000 downloaded books today. What the numbers don’t say though is how many of these books were free and how many were paid. If Apple could determine these and present the figures, we would know whether the iPad is really a serious to Kindle and other e-readers.
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