MTS sells iPhones to rich people in the Russian capital of Moscow, but sells lower-end phones that bring in lower revenues in other markets throughout the country. That brings certain opportunities. For one thing, MTS has bought its way into banking. Russia, Hecker said, is “underbanked and [has] a low number of consumers with credit cards.” But MTS, he said, “has enough ingredients to make banking successful.”

Hecker appeared with Carlos Domingo, who has been spearheading numerous efforts for Spain-based Telefonica, and both gave a glimpse of the market conditions in their parts of the world in a joint interview with Ina Fried at D: Dive Into Mobile in New York.

Telefonica is also active in several markets in Latin America, where the mix of available devices varies quite a bit from the typical iPhone-Android mix seen in the U.S. BlackBerry devices are still popular, though they are quickly giving way to low-end Android devices. And Nokia still sells a fair number of devices running its Symbian 30 operating system in Latin America.

Regarding the forthcoming open source mobile operating system from Mozilla, Domingo said consumers still carrying an older feature phone may find it attractive when they’re ready to upgrade to their first smartphone. “We think consumers will buy the device if it brings value to them,” he said.

In that same spirit, Hecker said MTS puts a lot of effort into promoting Windows Phone, if only to prevent the onset of a true duopoly between Google and Apple. “Windows Phone is still a tough sell,” he said. “We believe we need to push it; no one else out there is going to. … If we don’t support it, we’ll have a duopoly until the end of days.”

Last week, the fight between Apple and pugnacious hedge fund investor David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital went all flat when he withdrew a lawsuit after the company yanked a proxy proposal that would have allowed shareholders to vote on eliminating preferred stock from the company charter.

But the real issue at the core of the fight — the massive mountain of $137 billion in a cash hoard that Apple holds and that Einhorn wants it to distribute in some fashion to shareholders — still remains.

It’s not clear what Apple will do now, especially since a lot of it is overseas. But execs have indicated that they are evaluating what to do to best serve nervous investors, who have bidded the stock down 40 percent since the fall. While it’s not clear what that will be, it’s also pretty likely Apple will do something.

Until the company decides, though, I have some good ideas for CEO Tim Cook to consider:

* Apple could purchase 1,567,506 Tesla Model S Performance vehicles with 85 kWh battery and a carbon fiber spoiler at $87,400 each, which would effectively allow CEO Elon Musk to buy the New York Times (a bargain at $1.42 billion!) and use it as his own personal blog.

* It could buy 17.9 houses for each Yahoo employee located near its Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ, so they could be super-close to work, per CEO Marissa Mayer’s wishes. That breaks down to 206,015 overall homes for 11,500 workers, at a median sales price of $665,000 for the area.

* Apple could acquire a big chunk of the Internet all at once, including Groupon ($3.36 billion), Yahoo ($25.95 billion), Facebook ($61.7 billion), Twitter ($10 billion), LinkedIn ($18.32 billion), Yelp ($1.47 billion), AOL ($2.81 billion), Pandora ($2.09 billion), Zynga ($2.69 billion), OpenTable ($1.32 billion) and, finally, Pinterest ($2.5 billion). Phew.

* It could pay Andrew Mason’s $378.36 severance after getting jacked as CEO of Groupon 364,013,179 times over.

* Apple could pay for 97,857 parties for Yammer’s David Sacks’s 40th birthday (at $1.4 million each). Snoop Dogg included.

* It could foot the bill for the budget cuts to save the U.S. government $85 billion this year, so Americans could stop having to say “sequester.”

* Apple could buy $329 16 gigabyte Wi-Fi iPad minis for 416,413,374 people — everyone in the U.S. (315,429,318), plus France and Spain.

* Or it could just give the 7,069,909,686 people on the planet $19.38 each, and call it a day.

* Apple could use $1 bills to carpet an area of 560 square miles, which would more than cover Silicon Valley.

* Finally — and I think this would be a nice gesture to make up for calling his efforts a “silly sideshow” — Apple could give Einhorn 15.56 times the value of his $8.8 billion fund.

Or, of course, not.

Accused of copying the design of the original iPad last November, NT-K was dragged into court and slapped with a customs ban that kept its Android-based tablet off the market and caused it to miss the crucial holiday shopping season. Now vindicated, the company is striking back against Apple. Not only is it pursuing the iPad maker for loss of earnings and loss of potential future business, it is pushing forward with a complaint it filed with Spain’s National Competition Commission, accusing Apple of abusing its dominant position “with a clear intention to close the market and prevent entry to potential competitors.”

“We think that, given this was during the launch of the iPad, [Apple] was trying to keep as many tablets from entering the market as possible,” NT-K’s Pedro David Pelaez told Reuters. “We’re nothing; let’s be realistic. I don’t think they were looking just for us, but the sum of all of us together was something.”

It’s not clear if a formal antitrust inquiry will follow, but the threat is certainly there. And there may be bad news beyond this, as well. As Florian Mueller notes over at FOSS Patents, Apple went after NT-K for some of the same “Community Design” rights it claimed Samsung had violated in another ongoing IP case. So its loss in the NT-K case may set something of a bad precedent.

Memo to Flipboard, as well as Pulse, CNN’s Zite and AOL’s Editions: You might want to make some room in the already-crowded news and social reader space, because you’re about to get some bigfoot company.

Next Wednesday, according to sources close to the situation, Yahoo will finally officially unveil its offering, called Livestand.

And perhaps as early as next week or in the weeks soon after, Google will also weigh in with its version of the genre — code-named Propeller — which also might be the product’s name. Another moniker under strong consideration: Currents.

As I have previously reported, Google Propeller is an HTML5 reader for the Apple iPad and Android — essentially a souped-up version of similar apps such as Flipboard, AOL’s Editions, Zite (which was just bought by Time Warner’s CNN) and Pulse.

All these apps are part of the drastically changing habits of media consumers, helping users better navigate numerous social and media feeds — such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as news sites and more — using handsome interfaces and touch technologies on tablet devices.

Flipboard, the most prominent and elegant of these offerings, is now available only on the Apple iPad.

Flipboard’s traction among elite users, along with its high-level design ethos and strong reviews, is why Google tried to buy the well-funded company last year, sources said.

But Flipboard — which is backed by some of tech’s biggest venture players, who have invested more than $60 million at a $200 million valuation — declined the kind offer.

At the time, sources said, Google told Flipboard execs that if it did not buy the start-up, it planned to do a version of its own.

Hence, after I heard about the product earlier this year, I dubbed it the Flipinator.

According to sources, Propeller will launch with a plethora of media partners, as well as integration into the Google+ social network. The aim of the search giant is to offer media companies easy tools for publishing content on these devices, as well as a better path to monetization.

That is essentially the same plan at Yahoo, which has been working on Livestand with hopes of it being a product that will woo publishers into tight collaboration with the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Livestand was announced by Yahoo’s now-fired CEO Carol Bartz in February, at a speech at the World Mobile Congress in Spain.

At the time, Bartz demoed a magazinelike platform that would allow publishers to put up content easily and give users the ability to personalize their selections based on search history and interests.

Bartz called it “content in context.” (You can see the demo video below.)

But while Bartz promised the product within three months, development has been slowed by its complex technologies, bugs and the need to sign on publishers.

Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving is pushing the product hard as a way for the company to reinvigorate its media products.

It’s not clear how many publishers Yahoo will have at launch, and neither are the distribution plans, beyond flacking it from the Web site and being present in app stores.

Google, on the other hand, has its Android platform to push out Propeller, although it all must work as well on Apple’s iPad, which is the dominant tablet on the market.

But just because both Yahoo and Google are big companies is by no means a guarantee of success — think Yahoo 360 or Google Wave or Buzz — and their lateness might be a hindrance.

And, in fact, other news reader apps are much further along. The leader, Flipboard, has already had four million downloads and 50 partnerships with leading publishers.

It also has started to introduce rich advertising products and, perhaps most importantly, has tight social integration with Twitter and Facebook.

There will be social elements on both Yahoo’s Livestand and Google’s Propeller. But news reading will be stressed more, making them more like Pulse, a tiny but highly innovative start-up.

Each of the existing apps will presumably compete by adding on more features. Pulse recently added cross-platform, cross-device syncing, while Flipboard is close to unveiling an iPhone version it has said it was working on.

Yahoo and Google PR declined comment.

Here is the Livestand demo video from February:

The Spanish national police identified the individuals as senior members within Anonymous in Spain. A computer server found in one of the homes was responsible for helping launch attacks against a number of government and corporate websites, according to the police. That included against websites of the Sony Playstation Store, two large Spanish banks, and Italian energy company Enel, as well as of the governments of Egypt, Libya, Iran and elsewhere, the police said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Mobile messaging is also big, though in most parts of the world young women are far more likely than young men to send text and picture messages. There were some exceptions, such as India, where men were twice as likely as women to send texts and four times more likely to send pictures.

The Nielsen research was conducted in 19 countries, though the report broke out results only for the U.S., UK, India, Italy, Brazil, China, Spain, Russia and Germany. In most countries Nielsen surveyed 5,000 young people, though in the U.S. it surveyed 75,000 youths. In some countries the research was done face-to-face and in others the survey was done online.

In most countries across the globe, young men are more likely than women to have smartphones, though the U.S. is an exception with young women making up 55 percent of smartphone owners between 15 and 24. The adoption of smartphones versus feature phones also varies widely. In India, for example, feature phones outnumber smartphones 9 to 1 among young people, while in Italy smartphone adoption is nearing 50 percent among the younger set.

Advanced data usage was highest in the U.S and China, where about 17 in 20 young people did more than just make calls and send text and picture messages. That type of data use was least common in India, where only 13 percent did so, However, another 51 percent of Indian youths used their phones for text and/or picture messages.

The Nielsen study also looked at other patterns including use of more than one SIM card and whether phones are prepaid or postpaid, although those trends seemed to have more to do with how the country’s cell phone industry is set up as opposed to indicative of trends among youth.

However, when it first happened, many assumed that Anonymous–the loose affiliation of digital troublemakers who last week overwhelmed the Web sites of Mastercard and Visa–was making trouble again. Not so. In a statement to Bloomberg News, Amazon officially blamed the outage on the failure of some of its hardware at a facility in Dublin. Web monitoring service Netcraft has confirmed this by its own independent observations.

Amazon had last week come into the crosshairs of WikiLeaks supporters for its removal of files related to the organization’s leaks of previously secret U.S. diplomatic cables.

And indeed Anonymous had planned to attack Amazon but realized the target was too big and switched to PayPal instead.

Portugal Telecom said it would use some of the proceeds from the sale of its stake in Brazil’s Vivo Participacoes SA to buy a 22.4 percent stake in another Brazilian wireless carrier, Oi.

Telefonica and PT both said Wednesday their boards had approved the transaction, which was initially vetoed by the Portuguese government.

Brazil has become a battleground for Portugal Telecom and Telefónica, with both companies increasingly drawn to the high-growth region as revenue declines in their mature home markets and they suffer the lingering impacts of a severe recession. The country’s young population and relatively low mobile penetration rates also make it a prime market to pick up new wireless and Internet customers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

It’s hard to believe the 2010 FIFA World Cup is finally over, after lasting what felt like a badillion years.

But Spain grabbed the soccer championship Sunday, and now the vuvuzelas have gone silent.

Thankfully, the droning plastic horn that can cause ear damage was not the only music out there.

Thus, let’s play the videos for the official song (Shakira singing “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”); the official anthem (R. Kelly with “Sign of a Victory”); and my fave, the non-official “Wavin’ Flag” by K’naan.

Also I could not resist a short with a vuvuzela, of course!

Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)

Sign of a Victory

Wavin’ Flag

Vuvuzela

No other details, of course–specific verbiage is that sales “topped 2 million in less than 60 days”–but we can safely assume that most of those sales were in the U.S., since the device didn’t go on sale internationally until last weekend.

If you like statistics: That’s approximately 33,000 iPads per day, 1,388 iPads per hour and 23 iPads per minute.

And if you want to hear about the iPad from the man himself: Apple CEO Steve Jobs kicks off the D8 conference on Tuesday.

Press release excerpt:

Apple Sells Two Million iPads in Less Than 60 Days

CUPERTINO, Calif., May 31 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today announced that iPad(TM) sales have topped two million in less than 60 days since its launch on April 3. Apple began shipping iPad in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK this past weekend. iPad will be available in nine more countries in July and additional countries later this year.

“Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone.”

Apple (AAPL) will start accepting pre-orders for both the 3G and Wi-Fi models on Monday, May 10. And on May 28, Apple will begin shipping units in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the U.K.

The launch will continue in July when the iPad arrives in nine additional countries: Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore.

Apple has already sold more than one million iPads in the U.S. since the launch of the Wi-Fi-only model on April 3 and the 3G version on April 30. Given these sales figures and Apple’s supply issues to date, it will be interesting to see how the international rollout goes.

Who: Jonathan Tepper

What: COO, co-founder

Why: Jonathan left the finance sector to start what he calls a “street newswire.” Demotix continues to grow as competitors like Associated Press and Getty Images face harder times. Maybe he’s on to something.

Where: Demotix.com (Web site); @demotix (Twitter); London (analog place)

Who Else: AP, Reuters, and Getty Images, to name a few.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile:

Worst Job: The hands-down worst was as a waiter at a Mexican restaurant in college. They pretty much hired me as a go-between for the pretty waitresses and the kitchen staff, who only spoke Spanish. A close second was when I spent a year making PowerPoints for Lehman Brothers after I graduated.

Not Your Typical Home Life: I grew up in Spain, where my parents ran one of the first drug rehab centers in that country. My best friends growing up were HIV-positive ex-criminals who were in our work programs.

Newshound: I probably read 70 to 80 economic blogs a day. I use Google Reader; you have to. I also read probably 10 or so papers. Mostly the European press. It all takes me about an hour.

Inspirations: Probably my father. He created an international drug rehab center from scratch. That’s a real entrepreneur.

Uber Geekery: I’ve been reading lots of Pascal recently. Something about being restless while being alone in a room with one’s self resonates with me.

Bio in 140 Characters

He repatriated to the United States from Spain for school at UNC Chapel Hill and then received a Rhodes Scholarship. He left finance to fix the news.

The Five Questions

So you and your co-founder, Turi Munthe, decided 2007 would be a good time to get into journalism. What were you thinking?

Well, for us it was really about free speech. User-generated news is one way to do that. We are both very committed to that around the world. Turi said he had an idea; I asked if he needed a partner. We raised about a million dollars from friends and family and got it started.

The idea was to build a street newswire, one where amateur and semi-professional content could come together and the people who produce it could benefit from it. The vast majority of our outreach has been Turi traveling and meeting people. Today, we have around 14,000 contributors, 3,000 of whom I’d characterize as “active.”

Is this just another journalism business that works because it doesn’t pay contributors a living wage?

I know what you mean. Our model is different because it assumes the contributor is an amateur. That said, we do the work of promoting the images to outlets and we split the fees 50/50. Many of our contributors also live in places where the economics are different, so what would not be a living wage for you and me could be a life-changing amount of money for them. The economics are pretty interesting.

What does the process look like?

Well, of our 3,000 active contributors, I’d say we have about 200 worldwide who are what you might call “staff,” in that they contribute every day. A typical submission is 12 to 14 images. We intake them though our Web site, and then there is an editorial process where we decide what they are, if they are authentic, good, useful, etc. Turnaround time is usually 15 to 30 minutes, but can be as long as an hour. Then, they go up on the site. Once they are up, we reach out to news outlets who might want to run them.

One of the things that makes us really different is our ability to operate places that other wire services can’t. Our reporters are locals, and so when a government kicks all the AP people out, we still get images.

We just rolled out a new Web site and have started dealing in video as well, so we are looking forward to the changes those bring.

At the end of the year though, you are trying to turn a profit. Has that happened yet?

No. We’ve already done another round of funding. Mostly back to friends and family. I anticipate we will be cash-flow-positive in the next 12 to 18 months, maximum.

The whole venture capital industry seems really weird to me. To be profitable, they have to put $100 to $200 million to work, and they want to sell things for 10 times the money and have minimum size of investment, which doesn’t really make sense for us. So the angel, friends and family sort of thing makes more sense at our scale.

Has locating away from the Silicon Valley venture hub been a help or a hindrance?

I think we get a lot less press and recognition because of it. There’s a community journalism funding start-up, Spot.us, that gets just a ton of coverage. I don’t want to make it appear as though I’m dissing him in any way. He does great work, but I think Spot.us funded like 50 stories last year, and we do that in a day, and he gets a ton of coverage. I suspect it’s because he’s located in San Francisco. Not that he doesn’t deserve it, but it speaks to the coverage biases.

The In Living Color Interview

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100507/almost-famous-johnathan-tepper-of-demotix/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100420/3g-ipad-arrives-on-april-30/ http://allthingsd.com/20100420/3g-ipad-arrives-on-april-30/#comments Tue, 20 Apr 2010 12:50:49 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=38695 When Apple (AAPL) said the 3G-enabled version of its new iPad slate would ship by “late April,” it wasn’t kidding. In a press release issued moments ago, the company said the device will arrive at market and in the hands of U.S. customers who pre-ordered it on Friday, April 30.

The official announcement below.

iPad Wi-Fi + 3G Models Available in US on April 30

CUPERTINO, California—April 20, 2010—Apple® today announced that the Wi-Fi + 3G models of its magical iPad™ will be delivered to US customers who’ve pre-ordered on Friday, April 30, and will be available in Apple retail stores the same day starting at 5:00 p.m.

iPad allows users to connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before. Users can browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch HD videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more, all using iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch™ user interface. iPad Wi-Fi + 3G models are just 0.5 inches thick and weigh just 1.6 pounds—thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook—and deliver up to 10 hours of battery life for surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching videos or listening to music, and up to nine hours of surfing the web using a 3G data network.*

Apple retail stores will offer a free Personal Setup service to every customer who buys an iPad at the store, helping them customize their new iPad by setting up their email, loading their favorite apps from the App Store, and more. US Apple retail stores are also hosting special iPad workshops to help customers learn more about this magical new product.

Pricing & Availability
iPad is available in Wi-Fi models in the US for a suggested retail price of $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB and $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available on April 30 in the US for a suggested retail price of $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. iPad is sold in the US through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores, most Best Buy stores, select Apple Authorized Resellers and campus bookstores. AT&T is offering breakthrough 3G pre-paid data plans for iPad with easy, on-device activation and management.

iPad will be available at the end of May in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. Apple will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders for iPad on May 10.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100420/3g-ipad-arrives-on-april-30/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100409/junipers-kevin-johnson-talks-about-network-overload-the-ipad-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20100409/junipers-kevin-johnson-talks-about-network-overload-the-ipad-and-more/#comments Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:00:46 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=26332

When he was president of Microsoft’s Platforms and Services division, Kevin Johnson thought of all kinds of ways to load the Internet up to the gills.

Now, as CEO of networking giant Juniper Networks (JNPR), Johnson spends his time trying to figure out how to stop the Web’s runaway growth–especially with the surge of video and mobile broadband use–from grinding it to a halt.

At a series of recent industry conferences, such as the Mobile World Congress in Spain, Johnson has been trying to noise. One report was even titled, “The Internet Breaking Point: Why Economics Threatens Everything.”

Of course, Johnson also knows this is an opportunity for Juniper.

In any case, with the debut last week of the Apple (AAPL) iPad, a device that–win or lose–is heralding in an era of even heavier media consumption by consumers and businesses, BoomTown thought Johnson would be a good person to reflect on this key trend.

Because if the plumbing gets clogged, the magical abilities of all these kinds of product innovations becomes moot.

It’s an industry concern. Recently, Juniper rival Cisco (CSCO) unveiled a next-generation routing system to speed up Web video.

At Microsoft (MSFT), you might recall, Johnson was key point man in its bid to acquire Yahoo (YHOO), and he moved to Juniper after that effort failed.

Here’s the video of my interview with Kevin Johnson at his offices in Silicon Valley:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100409/junipers-kevin-johnson-talks-about-network-overload-the-ipad-and-more/feed/ 9 http://allthingsd.com/20100305/google-and-microsoft-look-at-clouds-from-the-same-side-now/ http://allthingsd.com/20100305/google-and-microsoft-look-at-clouds-from-the-same-side-now/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:00:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25092 Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer went all misty in a speech at the University of Washington, declaring in his strongest statement that cloud computing was mission critical for the software giant.

“This is the bet for the company,” Ballmer said. “For the cloud, we’re all in.”

And that’s also pretty much all the language you’ve been hearing from Google of late.

In a press event in Silicon Valley in December, in fact, Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra, when talking about mobile search, noted that the future of computing depends on one thing.

The “missing ingredient,” he said, is the cloud.

(Here is his slide showing that.)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said much the same at the Mobile World Congress in Spain last month.

And as recently as yesterday, in fact, one of the company’s execs–Europe head John Herlihy–said the desktop computer was finished because of the combination of smartphones and the cloud.

Microsoft’s Ballmer could not agree more. “We must move at ‘cloud speed,’ especially in our consumer offerings,” he wrote in a letter to employees yesterday, “All of our products make the cloud better, and the cloud makes our products better.”

While it’s doubtless that Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) will take the battle to the clouds, it is nice that they are both on the same marketing page for now.

And until we are all floating in the atmosphere, here’s a video of the ethereal Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now” in a live performance in 1970.

Clouds apparently got in her way and–unlike Google and Microsoft–she really doesn’t know clouds at all.

Enjoy the terrific video anyway:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100305/google-and-microsoft-look-at-clouds-from-the-same-side-now/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20100305/ipad-goes-on-sale-april-3-pre-orders-begin-march-12/ http://allthingsd.com/20100305/ipad-goes-on-sale-april-3-pre-orders-begin-march-12/#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:29:52 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=36177 So much for those rumored iPad delays and production bottlenecks. Apple said this morning that its new tablet device will arrive at market on Saturday, April 3, with pre-orders beginning March 12.

Initially, only Wi-Fi models will be available, with their 3G counterparts to follow later in the month. Late April will also see the device going on sale in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the U.K.

Given the time between the launch date of the Wi-Fi-only and 3G versions, will any early adopter be patient enough to wait for the latter?

Below, the press release announcing the iPad’s on-sale and shipping dates (Caution, Press release: May contain unnecessary superlatives, profound lack of objectivity).

iPad Available in US on April 3

Pre-Order on March 12

CUPERTINO, Calif., March 5/ — Apple® today announced that its magical and revolutionary iPad will be available in the US on Saturday, April 3, for Wi-Fi models and in late April for Wi-Fi + 3G models. In addition, all models of iPad will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK in late April.

Beginning a week from today, on March 12, US customers can pre-order both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models from Apple’s online store (www.apple.com) or reserve a Wi-Fi model to pick up on Saturday, April 3, at an Apple retail store.

“iPad is something completely new,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We’re excited for customers to get their hands on this magical and revolutionary product and connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.”

Starting at just $499, iPad lets users browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more. iPad is just 0.5 inches thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds-thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook-and delivers battery life of up to 10 hours.*

iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch™ interface makes surfing the web an entirely new experience, dramatically more interactive and intimate than on a computer. You can read and send email on iPad’s large screen and almost full-size “soft” keyboard or import photos from a Mac®, PC or digital camera, see them organized as albums, and enjoy and share them using iPad’s elegant slideshows. iPad makes it easy to watch movies, TV shows and YouTube, all in HD, or flip through the pages of an ebook you downloaded from Apple’s new iBookstore while listening to your music collection.

The App Store on iPad lets you wirelessly browse, buy and download new apps from the world’s largest app store. iPad includes 12 new innovative apps designed especially for iPad and will run almost all of the more than 150,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone® or iPod touch®. Developers are already creating exciting new apps designed for iPad that take advantage of its Multi-Touch interface, large screen and high-quality graphics.

The new iBooks app for iPad includes Apple’s new iBookstore, the best way to browse, buy and read books on a mobile product. The iBookstore will feature books from the New York Times Best Seller list from both major and independent publishers, including Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster.

The iTunes® Store gives iPad users access to the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store with a catalog of over 12 million songs, over 55,000 TV episodes and over 8,500 films including over 2,500 in stunning high definition. All the apps and content you download on iPad from the App Store, iTunes Store and iBookstore will be automatically synced to your iTunes library the next time you connect with your computer.

Pricing & Availability

iPad will be available in Wi-Fi models on April 3 in the US for a suggested retail price of $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for 64GB. The Wi-Fi + 3G models will be available in late April for a suggested retail price of $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB and $829 for 64GB. iPad will be sold in the US through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers.

iPad will be available in both Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + 3G models in late April in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. International pricing will be announced in April. iPad will ship in additional countries later this year.

The iBooks app for iPad including Apple’s iBookstore will be available as a free download from the App Store in the US on April 3, with additional countries added later this year.

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