Apple iPad hits two million sales in two months

But still a way to go to catch the netbook market...

The iPad is barely two months old but Apple has already shipped more than two million of the tablet devices, the company announced this week.

The web, email, media and app tablet went on sale in the US at the start of April. It arrived in UK shops just last week, along with stores in eight other international markets: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and Switzerland.

Stephen Fry poses with his iPad on UK launch day
(Photo credit: Rob Tomkinson/silicon.com)

Apple said the iPad will be available in nine more countries in July and additional countries later on this year.

There are now more than 5,000 dedicated apps available for the iPad, with the device also able to run the vast majority of the more than 200,000 iPhone apps available through the App Store, according to Apple.

It may be flying off the shelves but the iPad has a long way to go to catch up with the more established netbook market, which continues to see significant growth. Last month analyst house Gartner forecast worldwide netbook shipments will total 41.8 million units in 2010 - a 30 per cent increase from 2009's shipments of 32.1 million units.

The analyst company added media tablets such as the iPad will not affect netbook sales immediately.

"Media tablets will not impact the mini-notebook segment this year," Gartner research analyst Raphael Vasquez said in a statement. "However, media tablets, such as the iPad and similar devices, will significantly detract from mini-notebook shipments in 2013 and onward, when we expect their prices to be lower and, more importantly, their functionality to be more similar to mini-notebooks."

Gartner also believes media tablets will become a bigger market than full-fat tablet PCs.

Last month the analyst predicted around 10 million media tablets will ship this year, while traditional tablets will only notch up approximately two million sales over the same period.

Gartner defines media tablets as devices with a screen size of five inches or larger which run a restricted-function OS such as Google's Android or Apple's iPhone OS, while it defines tablet PCs as having a similar size touchscreen but running a full-function operating system such as Windows 7 or Mac OS X.