Time for the analysts to fire up their engines. Apple has made a press release saying that they have successfully sold two million iPad units in the first 60 days of the inception of the iPad (April 3). The iPad became available became available available to countries outside the US for the first time late last week (officially anyway). This resulted in a massive boost in sales of the iPad. The demand has bee great in all of the 9 countries that got the iPad (UK, Japan, Switzerland, Spain, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy) and there have been reports of massive iPad frenzy in the UK and surprisingly — Japan.
These numbers are probably representative of all sales of iPads in all the 10 countries it is available in right now minus the corporate sales that might take this number much higher. Apple usually does not count the number of bulk sales they make that way. So the actual number of iPad that they have made might be much higher than that we are getting to hear about.
Steve Jobs is quoted in the press release saying that Apple’s international customers are enjoying the iPad as much as everyone at Apple and that the company is trying to keep up with the demand to make enough iPads for all its customers. Apple has said in the release that the iPad will be available in nine more countries in the month of July and in more countries in the later part of this year. July might be the month when the iPad is released across more of the Europe and some of the other Asian countries such as India and Korea.
Apple also mentions that developers have created over 5,000 new apps especially for the iPad and the App store number is still at somewhere over 200,000 although some are saying that it is closer to 250,000 now. I guess we will probably know that through another Steve Jobs quote.
Apple’s iPad, hate it or love it, been in the news ever since it was released. Whether for achieving sales milestones or for being broken and blended — the iPad has been around these parts for the 60 days that this sales milestone quotes. It has successfully ushered in a new era of handheld computing devices that have a more goal oriented approach to product design and user interface. Instead of doing it all, the new mantra is to do some key things very well.
Of course, there are some manufacturers that still don’t get it. So they are continuing with their effort to squeeze in an entire desktop OS (Windows 7 or XP, as the case may be) in to devices ranging from 7 to 10 inches. Most of them are running on Intel’s Atom and some on ARM and similarly designed chips.
The rest of the market is playing Catch the iPad right now by banking on the power and openness of the Android OS from Google. The latest version of the OS has just been unveiled and Google had a lot of promises to make about the speed and the new features. Even though most of the manufacturers are going to release their devices with older Android versions (due to development cycles), FroYo (Android 2.2) should give a lot of future tablets a much needed speed boost.
Apple in the meantime is probably busy with the new iPhone that they are supposed to be launching any time now. The latest iPhone OS — 4.0 — already has the makings of a great upgrade to the platform and there was a patent that shows us that Apple has been working on some deep social integration for its phone. If all that comes out together, the iPad and iPhone combo will become one hard pair to beat.
