Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed off a new smartphone operating system on Thursday that features an advertising platform to compete with Google’s, and revealed stronger-than-expected sales of 450,000 units for the iPad.
The iPhone 4.0 software will be available on Apple’s hugely popular smartphone this summer, complete with a number of upgrades, including a long-awaited multi-tasking capability that allows the use of several applications at once.
A version of the iPhone’s operating system is also used on the iPad, and the latest generation of software will come to Apple’s new tablet computer this fall.
The new advertising platform for the iPhone and iPad — dubbed iAd — marks Apple’s first foray into a small but growing market, and is sure to please the thousands of application developers who make their living off those devices, providing them with a new revenue stream.
The iPad’s early sales impressed analysts, many of whom expect 1 million units to be sold in the quarter ending June, and roughly 5 million this year, though estimates vary widely.
“We’re making them as fast as we can. Our ramp is going well, but evidently we can’t quite make enough of them yet so we’re going to have to try harder,” Jobs said, noting iPad sellouts at Best Buy stores.
The electronics giant has staked its reputation on the 9.7-inch touchscreen tablet, essentially a cross between a smartphone and a laptop. It is helping foster a market for tablet computers that is expected to grow to as many as 50 million units by 2014, analysts say.
“I think it’s pretty impressive, five days almost half a million units, and it shows there’s still pretty good momentum behind the first day,” Gartner analyst Van Baker said.
Despite critics who question whether a true need exists for such a gadget, analysts expect Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others to trot out their own competing devices this year.
Since the iPad went on sale last Saturday, users have downloaded 600,000 digital books and 3.5 million applications for the device, Jobs said. There are already 3,500 apps available for the iPad.
At a media event at the company’s Cupertino, California, headquarters, Jobs said Apple had so far sold more than 50 million iPhones. That implies that the company sold 7 million or more devices in the first quarter, which would be above many analysts’ phone forecasts.
Apple is expected to launch the fourth-generation model of its iPhone, which was introduced in 2007, later this year.
Pancreatic cancer survivor Jobs, looking thin but energetic, introduced the iAd mobile platform, which he said had the opportunity to make 1 billion ad impressions a day on tens of millions of Apple mobile device users.
IAds will allow applications developers to use advertisements in their apps, pocketing 60 percent of the revenue. Apple will sell and host the ads.
Apple’s entry into the mobile ad arena had been widely expected. This year, it paid US$270 million for Quattro Wireless, an advertising network that spans both mobile web sites and smartphone applications.
Google, which already sells advertising on smartphones, agreed to buy mobile ad firm AdMob late last year. US regulators are examining the deal’s antitrust implications.
Jobs said Apple was also in the hunt to buy AdMob before Google “snatched them from us because they didn’t want us to have them.”
The comments were just the latest hint at the rift that has emerged between Apple and Google, which were once allies but now compete in a number of arenas.
Research group Gartner expects the mobile advertising market to expand by 78 percent to US$1.6 billion this year.
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