Update: Read more on iPad’s launch weekend sales

It’s day two now of the iPad mania and like everyone we are very curious to know what the sales figures were of yesterday and what they will be for this year. Most iPad coverage by the press and voices from the public (just look ath the hashtag #ipad on Twitter) have been fairly positive. The backlash electronics manufacturers usually see after a hyped product is released, seems to be non-existant with the iPad. There are some bugs to be worked out as usual but overall the device seems to be what people expected it to be.

Now let’s look at those sales predictions for this week, this year and onward. There is many industry analysts who have an opinion about this flaky subject. Four analysts stick out from the crowd: Gene Munster from PiperJaffray, Mike Abramsky from RBC Capital Markets, Brian Marshall from Broadpoint-Amtech and research firm iSupply.

As all analysts have a different idea, we have averaged up their numbers to come to a rough idea of what we can expect. At the launch weekend (yes that is this weekend) we can expect an estimated 275,000 units to go over the counter and 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 it is expected 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.

The analysts are conclusive and what are the constraining factors for the iPad’s sales: a lack of supply and the missing of Adobe Flash on the device.

The lack of supply is why the iPad was previously delayed a few days in the U.S. and why it will be released later than planned in the rest of the world.

In addition, many mainstream users who want to use the device to consume content on the web choose to wait out to buy the device since it does not have Flash support. It’s a fair judgement and it will be challenging to see how Apple deals with this issue, which Steve Jobs himself created.