Apple sells 300,000 sanitary products in first day

Apple has announced it has sold 300,000 iPads on the first day of launch (up until midnight April 3rd 2010) - OK they're not sanitary pads, but it makes a good headline.

Those 300,000 iPad users have also downloaded over 1m apps and 250,000 ebooks from the Apple iBookstore, so that's 3 apps and almost 1 ebook per iPad.

Skeptics may just think it's a rush of Apple fan boys, but Apple are changing the game. People bemoan it's a proprietary operating system (so what) it means that Apple can control the content easily and the way apps look and feel, so it's all easy to use. Apple know how to do User Interfaces (UI) and make things look nice. As long as programmers stick to Apple's guidelines using Apple's interfaces their programs will look nice too. So anybody will be able to use the app.

The iPad is no better in terms of specs than other systems out there, but they're not selling it as an eReader, nor as a tablet but a combination of the two. Amazon have realised that the Kindle can do more than just be an eReader, but they've only just released an SDK. The iPad will run existing iPhone/iTouch apps with no modifications (under emulation) but they've had the SDK available for months, so there's some good iPad apps out there on launch (including Apple's own iWork apps). It also makes a very nice eReader and lo and behold Apple have an ebook store available on launch.

The iPad will be iconic, just like the iPhone was. Yes it's lacking a camera (yes there's a space for an iSight camera in the case) and other features, but they will come. Owning an iPad now is like owning a piece of history.