Apple: iPad sales, App Store downloads climbing

The iPad has been out for less than a week, but Apple says it’s already sold 450,000 tablets. The news came straight from Apple CEO Steve Jobs who led off Thursday’s iPhone 4.0 event at the company’s Cupertino campus with a string of statistics about the iPad, iPhone, and App Store.

The forthcoming iPhone 4.0 OS update may have been the headliner at Apple’s press-only event, but iPad sales figures opened Jobs’ presentation. In addition to revealing iPad sales figures, Apple’s CEO also noted that customers have bought more than 600,000 books through the iPad’s iBooks app. What’s more, the App Store has served more than 3.5 million iPad apps, with a total of 4 billions apps downloaded overall from the store.

The growth of the the App Store shows no sign of slowing down, with the inventory having grown to 185,000 apps—3,500 of which are apps that are either built exclusively for the iPad or run on all of Apple’s mobile devices.

Earlier this week, Apple reported that it had sold 300,000 iPads on the first day of sales, meaning its added to the total by 150,000 since then. On Thursday, Jobs said that Best Buy—which is selling the iPad along with the Apple Store and select resellers—is out of stock in most locations.

In addition to announcing iPad sales, Jobs said Apple has sold more than 50 million iPhones and 30 million iPod touches. That brings the total number of iPhone OS devices out there to more than 85 million.