Prepare Ye the Way!
Connie Guglielmo and Mary Childs:
Apple Says IPad Tablet to Go on Sale April 3 in U.S.: March 5 (Bloomberg) -- Apple Inc., betting on consumer demand for touch-screen mobile computers, plans to start selling the iPad in the U.S. on April 3 and will take preorders for the device next week. The company will initially sell models that connect to the Internet using Wi-Fi networks, starting at $499. Versions that can also tap mobile-phone networks will be available in late April, Apple said today. When Apple introduced the iPad in January, the company said it would be available in March. Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs has pitched the iPad as mobile device that falls between smartphones and laptop computers. With a 9.7-inch (25-centimeter) touch screen, it serves up Web pages, e-mail, music, videos, games, electronic books and iPhone applications. Apple may sell as many as 6 million this year, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. “Demand will far outstrip supply for the next little while,” said Peter Misek, an analyst at Canaccord Adams in Toronto, who rates the shares “buy” and doesn’t own any. “The U.S. is a priority market so the U.S. is going to get the first supply.”...
Jobs, who co-founded Apple in 1976 as a personal-computer maker, says it’s now one of the world’s biggest mobile-device companies. Sales of the iPhone and the iPod music player -- whose technologies figure prominently in the iPad -- together accounted for more than half of revenue last quarter. The Macintosh computer, meanwhile, contributed 28 percent of Apple’s $15.7 billion in quarterly sales. Expectations for the iPad are high among Apple fans, who had dubbed Apple’s previous mobile gadget the “Jesus phone.”
“Like the first iPhone, iPad 1.0 is a John the Baptist preparing the way of what is to come,” actor Stephen Fry wrote in his technology blog. “It’s not just a scaled-up iPhone or a scaled-down, multi-touch enhanced laptop -- it is a whole new kind of device.”
