Apple's iPad 2 drew thousands of British shoppers who queued for up to 33 hours on Friday, with the number waiting exceeding those last year according to researchers.
As the doors opened at the company's flagship store in Regent St in London, the queue was 632 people long, compared to 451 in May 2010, said Protectyourbubble, a gadget insurance company. Figures gathered by the Guardian suggested that there were thousands waiting at stores elsewhere in the country, with the queue at Birmingham's Bull Ring estimated at more than a thousand as it stretched out of the shopping centre, and lengthy queues in Brighton, the Bluewater shopping centre and others.
However some third-party retailers were reported to have short supplies, with Phones4U said to have only one iPad per store, and some PC World stores only having the cheapest version.
Expectations are now growing that the number of tablets sold this quarter will far exceed those sold last year, when Apple dominated the market by selling 14.8m iPads, comprising between 75% and 90% of the market.
A number of companies, including Motorola, RIM and Samsung intend to offer challengers to the iPad soon in the UK, at similar prices. But more companies are expected to attempt to offer cheaper Android tablets to try to grab a share of the market. That will have been helped by RIM's announcement on Thursday night that it will enable Android apps to run on its forthcoming 7-inch PlayBook tablet.
But it is not only consumers who are expressing interests in the iPad and tablets generally. Peter O'Donoghue, head of the consultancy Deloitte's technology practice, said his research suggests that "millions of units will be shipped to retail, hospital, military, and the banking market. People are increasingly talking about tablet computers as a work tool." He calculates that businesses could make up 25% of the tablet market this year, but 40% in 2014. "In some ways, the virtues of tablets - easy to use, virus-resistant, and portable - are enormously appealing to businesses," he remarked.
Reseach by Protectyourbubble found that this year's iPad buyers are subtly different in attitude to those last year. Compared to expectations in 2010, when nobody had used the device, more people now want to play games (33% v 12%) and watch films (13% v 3%) with it, while fewer expect to use it principally to browse the web (30% v 57%) or use different apps (8% v 15%). There is a small increase in the number who want to use it for reading books (7% v 4%) - which will be a disappointment to Apple's attempt to push its iBooks platform.
The company also found that the profile of the queuers outside Regent St did not fit an obvious demographic.
• 44% in the queue just used Windows PCs; 46% owned a Mac and 10% owned both;
• 10% in the queue had Android gadgets, with 75% owning an iPhone. 15% owned other brand phones; one person had a Windows Phone;
• 60% were aged 18-25; 28% aged 26-39; 2% 56 and over (the same age or more than Steve Jobs)
• 14% of those queuing were women, nearly twice last year's 8% number
• 34% wrongly assumed the iPad would just be available from the Apple Store. (Other retailes were also selling it.) Most said they queued for the atmosphere and "to be there" (49%), only 6% admitted to being die-hard Mac fans, and 13% "didn't know" why they'd queued.
The interest in the iPad, which costs as much as a small laptop, may indicate that people are prepared to pay more for the devices. O'Donoghue said that he does not expect cheap tablets priced at around £100 to flourish. "The higher end products from £400 upwards are likely to be the mass market, and cut-price tablets will be relatively niche. Lower-end products are not likely to offer the combination of ease-of-use, range of applications, processing power and screen quality that purchasers, actual or prospective, are going to expect from a tablet."
O'Donoghue added: "Some have commented that the popularity of the tablet will challenge the laptop market. Deloitte disagrees. Our view is that both laptops and netbooks are likely to remain in strong demand for years to come."
However Acer, the world's second biggest computer maker behind HP but ahead of Dell, on Friday warned that its first-quarter PC revenues will be about 10% below those of the fourth quarter, which were themselves 11% down year-on-year. It blamed weak sales in North America and Europe - the two areas where tablets are selling most strongly.
At the beginning of March the research company Gartner lowered its forecast for 2011 PC sales to 387.8m units, a 10% growth from 2010, rather than the 15% growth it had forecast in December - and the 18% growth it had anticipated in mid-2010 before the extent of sales of tablets had become clear.
