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| Happy girl to Have one new iPad in Sydney |
Apple's new iPad goes on sale to be another hot-seller. Hundreds of crazy for i-pad consumer queuing before dawn in Sydney to be the first to get their hands on the 4G-ready tablet computer as the company's share price hit $600 for the first time.
The eager faces lined up around city streets to buy the iPad 3, one firm that took the device apart said Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Samsung Electronics had all held onto their prized roles as key parts suppliers. Apple's own outlets were beaten to the punch for the first store sales by Australian phone company Telstra, which started selling in Sydney and Melbourne just after midnight, eight hours before Apple's flagship stores opened.
Crowds were down on previous Apple launches, but there was still excitement as stores opened. The buzz helped propel its shares to record highs in U.S. trade on Thursday, with Apple stock touching a high of $600.01 before easing back. It peaked half an hour after the first iPad went on sale in Australia, extending the market worth of the world's most valuable company to almost $560 billion. Only a month earlier, it had crossed $500. The stock has jumped 45 percent this year. At the closing price of $585.56, the stock is still more expensive than the $499 starting price for a Wi-Fi-only iPad.
Apart from Australia, the new iPad is going on sale on Friday in nine other countries, including the United States, Canada, Singapore, France and Britain. Elsewhere around the globe, diehards had already begun lining up in front of Apple stores in Munich, Paris, London, Singapore and Hong Kong.
The third-generation iPad is seen more as a collection of incremental improvements, such as a high-definition "retina" display and a better camera, rather than a major innovation. The inner workings of the iPad are similar to previous models, based on a "teardown" by a tinkerer from California gadget-repair firm iFixit, who queued up in Australia to get one of the new tablets and quickly took it apart for a Web blog.
There are three main tablet challengers to consider as an alternative to the "iPad 3."
1. The Asus Tranformer Prime
2. The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
3. The iPad 2.
