Apple iPad goes on sale in Britain
Apple's new iPad goes on sale in the UK today and is expected to spark a flurry of sales of second hand tablets.
7:15AM GMT 16 Mar 2012
Around a dozen people queued overnight outside the Apple retail store in London's Regent Street for the chance to be among the first to own the new iPad and many more joined in the early hours.
One person even offered his spot in the queue for sale on eBay. He wrote on the auction site: "I took my place by mistake in the queue two days ago not realising it was the queue for the new Apple iPad 3 to be released in UK on 16th March. I don't require the position now as I am not an Apple fan and am therefore putting it up for sale to the highest bidder."
The new iPad was announced by Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, in San Francisco last week. It has a high resolution 'retina' display that has four times as many pixels as on the iPad, improved graphics performance and a better camera.
Apple has also added LTE mobile broadband connectivity, though that will not be an option to customers in Britain, where there are no LTE networks. However, the new iPad does have improved 3G connectivity.
Mobile trade-in site SellMyMobile said that the number of customers selling their tablet computer had increased by more than 300 per cent as the launch of the new iPad approached. The most commonly traded model was the 16GB iPad 2 with 3G and WiFi.
Last week, eBay said that more than 16,000 iPads had been listed for sale in the two weeks preceding the Apple announcement, suggesting that many users were preparing to upgrade.
Apple has sold more than 55 million iPads since the device launched two years ago. Analysts Canaccord Genuity said earlier this week that they expected the company to sell around 65 million iPads this year.
The analysts said Apple's rivals would probably struggle to launch rival products over the next couple of quarters. They said: "While Samsung appears to have the most compeititive Android tablet offering, we view Windows 8 as a greater longer-term threat to Apple's dominant iPad share than Android tablets."
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