Apple Inc. says it sold more than 300,000 iPads on Saturday, the day it debuted across the United States, but some analysts suggest the hotly anticipated device will have a tougher challenge when it hits the Canadian market later this month.
Part of the uphill battle comes down to content -- because what many American users might find appealing about the iPad may be exactly what Canadian users won't be able to see.
Deloitte technology analyst Duncan Stewart said one of the biggest setbacks Canadian users might find at the outset may already be a familiar pet peeve on the Internet.
"If you've ever been sent a link from a U.S. friend saying 'Hey, (watch) this cool comedy clip,' half the time it doesn't work north of the border," Stewart said.
Similar lockouts and a drought of content could face Canadian users in the early days, he suggested.
"If iPads are available in Canada this month, it doesn't mean that the content for the iPads will also be available at the same time," Stewart said.
The relatively fast pace of the iPad's debut has left some Canadian companies scrambling to come up with a way to get their content on the portable screens.
Toronto Star spokesman Bob Hepburn said the newspaper is in the process of creating a program that will get display its content in an iPad-friendly format, in an application quite similar to the New York Times.
Meanwhile, the Globe and Mail already has a program that will convert its stories into a format intended for both iPhones and iPads.
The case was similar last year when Amazon's Kindle made its Canadian debut with hardly any Canadian content available. Even iconic authors like Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro had only a handful of titles available in the early days.
Over the weeks and months after the Kindle's debut more titles began to appear for Canadian shoppers, but licensing issues still keep some titles from making their way onto domestic devices.
In the U.S., the iPad's first-weekend sales were relatively modest, given the weeks of hype about the revolutionary nature of Apple's new touch-screen tablet device. Furthermore, the figures included pre-orders that were picked up or delivered Saturday and iPads sent to retail stores such as Best Buy but not necessarily purchased. Apple did not say how many went to such stores.
Assuming most of the 300,000 iPads ended up in the hands of consumers Saturday, though, the figure is in line with the number of iPhones that Apple sold when the smart phone made its debut in June 2007. Apple didn't publicize first-day sales at the time, but later earnings reports indicated the company sold about 270,000 iPhones during the first two days the gadget was available.
Apple sold 1.1 million more iPhones over the next three months. The volume has only increased as Apple has released new versions of the phone in a growing number of countries and software developers have created add-on programs, or "apps," that do everything from online banking to mapping bike rides using GPS. In the most recent quarter, Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones.
- With files from The Associated Press
