A 19-year-old boy from Tokyo (Takechiyo Yamanaka) who wanted to be one of the first iPad owners in Japan took his place before the Apple store almost 2 days before the start of sales. In the morning of the 28th of May, the about 1,2 thousand people formed a queue of 800 meters. A similar situation was usual also in other countries.
And it’s not a surprise. The previous Friday was the day when Apple started iPad sales in nine new countries. An unprecedented boom was at the flagship Apple store in Tokyo.
The price for the model that supports Wi-Fi and 16 GB embedded memory was 48,800 yen in Japan (or about $537). For comparison: the same model can be bought in the U.S. at the price of $499. According to independent experts of RBC Capital Markets, about 476 thousand of Apple iPads will be sold in Japan.
The queues in Sydney (Australia) were not as long as in Tokyo was, but their length was also impressive — about 200 meters. A 22-year-old Rahul Koduri was the first customer there. The cost of the basic device version was 629 Australian dollars, or approximately $533. Today iPad is also available for sale in Italy, Germany, France, Canada, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.
According to Apple representatives, iPad apps developers have created about 5 thousand applications for this tablet PC + 200 thousand of other applications for iPhone and iPod touch that are also available for iPad users.
Oliver Block, one of Windows CE developers, wrote in his diary that participants of the last conference devoted to integrated systems in San Jose asked him the same questions. They were interested if CE was killed by its developers going forward to the ARM-platform, or if developers were using Visual Studio and whether all Windows Embedded products were based on different SKU.