'Hundreds Of Thousands' Of iPads Ordered So Far'Hundreds Of Thousands' Of iPads Ordered So Far

Apple has yet to share official numbers for iPad pre-orders, but the Wall Street Journal says that in one week "hundreds of thousands" of them have been pre-ordered. Additionally, Apple hasn't finalized all the content deals it was hoping to by launch.The Journal cites people "familiar with the matter" as the source for its numbers. By their word, Apple has pre-sold "hundreds of thousands" of iPads.

The Journal reports, "Apple could sell more iPads in its first three months than it sold iPhones in the three months after the smart phone's debut." The iPhone sold 1 million units in the first 74 days it was available for sale. Can the iPad sell as many? Well, it's certainly possible.

What's perhaps more interesting is that the same sources indicated that Apple is still furiously trying to lock down content deals for the iPad. Some of the content deals Apple originally hoped to lock down include $1 television shows, as well as newspaper subscriptions, magazine subscriptions and textbooks. These have been shelved for the moment and Apple is instead focusing on finalizing other content deals in the works.

Apple hopes to have the deals pinned down before the April 3 launch of the device. Will Apple delay the device if the content deals aren't inked in time?

In order to provide some perspective, other's aren't so rosy on the iPad pre-sales figures. The same blogger who over the weekend said that 50,000 were pre-ordered in the first two hours, and 152,000 by Sunday night, says that he believes there are about 10,000 iPad's being pre-ordered each day. According to him, that would put the total number of pre-orders just over 200,000 by Friday.

Either way, I can't think of any netbooks that have received this much attention ahead of launch. Has this much demand for a tablet computing device always been present, or are we still in the "pure fanboy" phase of things?

These and other questions won't be answered until the device has been in the market for several months.