Apple on Monday announced that it sold over 300 thousand of iPad tablets in the U.S. as of midnight Saturday, April 3. The company considers sales of iPad successful, even though it should be noted that the vast majority of shipped gadgets were pre-ordered in the course of months as well as shipments to Apple’s partners.

These sales included deliveries of pre-ordered iPads to customers, deliveries to channel partners and sales at Apple Retail Stores. Apple also announced that iPad users downloaded over one million apps from Apple’s App Store and over 250 thousand of ebooks from its iBookstore during the first day.  The latter number indicates that the vast majority of iPad owners will not use the tablet as electronic book readers.

“It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world – it’s going to be a game changer. iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive officer.

Apple iPad is based on Apple’s own A4 system-on-chip designed by PA Semi team that contains ARM processor core at 1GHz. The SoC is tailored for ultra-mobile applications and can enable device to work for up to 10 hours in active mode (reading, watching videos or listening to music) with display brightness reduced by 50%, a rather remarkable achievement for a tablet PC, but well below that of electronic book readers. Performance and capabilities of the SoC are unknown, but since during the official presentation Apple demonstrated a Need for Speed: Shift version running on the iPad, the graphics core of the SoC may be very powerful and may be licensed from Imagination Technologies.

The iPad is equipped with 9.7” multi-touch IPS LCD screen with 768x1024 resolution; 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of flash storage; USB, Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and 3G (special versions only) connectivity as well as SD card reader. The product is 9.56” (24.3cm) in height, 7.47” (19cm) in width and has 0.5” (1.3cm) thickness. Apple iPad weighs 1.5 pounds (0.68kg). The tablet PC runs iPhone OS 3.2 with all of its pros and cons and can also run applications developed for iPhone as well as specially designed software.

Tags: Apple, iPad