Apple has sold more than 450,000 iPads, with 3.5M downloads

Apple announced that it has sold more than 450,000 iPads as of today since the tablet computer went on sale on Saturday.
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs made the announcement at its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., today, as a small group of bloggers tweeted and live-blogged the happenings.
Jobs also said that the company has sold more than 450,000 iPads since Saturday, including 300,000 sold on the first day itself. That’s lower than other estimates that circulated. But Best Buy has sold out its allocation of machines and Jobs said Apple is trying to re-stock as fast as it can.
More than 3.5 million iPad apps have already been downloaded, including 1 million on the first day. And more than 600,000 bo0ks have been downloaded from the iBook store since it went live Saturday. There are now 3,500 apps in the AppStore just for the iPad, while there are 185,000 altogether. More than 4 billion AppStore apps have been downloaded.
Jobs is set to make more announcements about the iPhone OS version 4. The pattern is very similar to what Apple did last year. It announced the features of the iPhone 3.0 operating system at a March 2009 event and then launched the features during the summer.
Currently, the iPad runs iPhone OS 3.2, while the iPhone and iPod Touch are running OS 3.1.3. Rumors of a multitasking iPhone operating system have been around for a while.
[Photo credit: gdgt]. For more news, follow gdgt’s live blog of the event.