Apple just announced over 300,000 iPads were sold during its launch weekend. These sales include pre-orders, deliveries to channel partners and sales at Apple stores.

This is a very high number if you take into account the iPhone‘s launch sales which were 270,000.The iPad outsold the iPhone during launch. And this is magnificent, if you think about it. The iPad is a much more difficult product to market as mainstream consumers are not used to tablet devices at all. The iPhone was refreshing but it was a smartphone and most people had already used smartphones ( e.g. BlackBerry or HTC devices).

iPad users downloaded over one million iPad apps: that is more than 3 apps downloaded per sold device, and over 250,000 ebooks were sold from the Apple iBookstore, close to one book per sold device.

Our predictions were pretty darn close! We predicted 275,000 iPads to be sold in the launch weekend and we missed out by about 25,000 units. Our predictions for iPad sales in the launch weekend were found by averaging prediction figures from four industry analysts: Gene Munster from PiperJaffray, Mike Abramsky from RBC Capital Markets, Brian Marshall from Broadpoint-Amtech and research firm iSupply.

So let’s look at our previously made predictions, cause we seem to be getting quite close to real numbers. We estimated some 2.65 million units in the current quarter (that is from March 2010 to the end of May 2010, or Q2). In the whole of 2010 we expect Apple will sell 8 million iPads. If we extrapolate that number from the rest of 2010 to the whole of 2011, we can expect over 10 million units to be sold next year. Again these are just averages but do give us an indication of what to expect.

MORE ON THIS TOPIC

1. iPad sales figures show mixed reports; over 10 mln sold in 2011
2. There’s one Million iPads in Beijing, uh.. the world
3. Today is iPad D-Day; 1.2 million iPads over the counter by 2011