Apple CEO Steve Jobs asserted during an April 8 presentation at the company's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters that some 450,000 iPads had been sold, around 150,000 more than the 300,000 sold on April 3, the tablet device's first day of release. Online reports have also indicated that Best Buy, Apple's sole iPad channel partner, has temporarily sold out of its stock of the devices. Jobs was using his presentation to unveil the iPhone OS 4, which includes multitasking and a mobile advertising platform dubbed "iAd."
Apple sold around 450,000 iPads through April 8, CEO
Steve Jobs said during a presentation at the company's Cupertino,
Calif., headquarters, along with some
600,000 iBooks downloaded and 3.5 million apps. Apple had previously announced
that the multitouch tablet device had sold 300,000 units by midnight on April 3, its first day of general release.
Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported that Best Buy, Apple's sole
iPad channel partner, had sold out of its iPad inventory, although that inventory
would supposedly be restocked by April 11.
Although Jobs used the presentation to display the short-term success of the
iPad,
the
event's actual focus was on the unveiling of the next-generation iPhone OS 4,
which contains several fairly radical changes to the traditional iPhone
interface. Prime among them is the ability to multitask, something Apple had
denied previous versions of the device's operating system, and a feature by
which rival manufacturers such as Google attempted to differentiate their own
smartphones.
In a move that may eventually prove more
controversial, Apple also introduced an advertising platform, dubbed
"iAd," which will allow developers to embed advertising directly into
their apps. Apple believes that, based on the amount of time that iPhone owners
spend using apps, the iAd platform is capable of some 1 billion ad impressions
per day.
Jobs announced that the iPhone OS 4 will support iBooks, an e-reader
application that originally made its debut with the iPad. Both the iPhone and
iPad versions feature the same user interface, with books displayed on
blonde-wood shelving; in addition, ebooks will sync their bookmarks and last page
read on both the user's iPad and iPhone-functionality that mimics that of
Amazon's Kindle, which allows book data to be ported between the Kindle
e-reader, mobile devices and PCs.
By the end of 2010, Apple
will find itself facing a few more competitors in the tablet space.
Hewlett-Packard, perhaps most notably, has been issuing videos and official
blog posts detailing its upcoming slate device, which will feature at least one
camera along with video conferencing capability. On April 5, Engadget leaked
what was purportedly an internal HP presentation, detailing how the slate
device would retail for between $549 and $599, and feature a 1.6GHz Intel Atom
Z530 processor and an inward-facing VGA Webcam, along with an outward-facing
3-megapixel camera.
Nokia is also developing a tablet competitor for later this year, according
to recent online reports. "The market will play host to a flood of 'me
too' tablets in 2010, but it's an immature product category with an unproven
use case," CSS Insight analyst Geoff
Blaber told Reuters on April 7. "Apple's brand and service offering means
the iPad will be an exception in a category that will struggle to gain consumer
acceptance."
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