Wondering How iPad Did On Day 1 of Pre-Order?

With all the attention iPad has gotten in the past few days, we were wondering how many iPad's were pre-ordered on day 1. The iPad officially became available for pre-order early yesterday and while plenty of you are still debating about whether or not to pre-order, reports show that Apple sold 51,000 units in just two hours via pre-order.

A group of particularly prudent Apple fans from the APPL Sanity Board at Investor Village decided to put together a spreadsheet of order numbers, times that orders were placed and contents of those order.

Fortune’s Phillip Elmer-DeWitt reports:

“51,000 orders in two hours,” announced Victor Castroll shortly after noon. He’s an analyst with Valcent Financial Group and an AAPL Sanity member who, with the blogger-analyst who calls himself deagol, has been monitoring the spreadsheet.

This matches other estimates from blogger Andrew Erlichson who wrote:

“We just bought two iPads, about 30 minutes apart. Our order IDs are 10,000 apart. Assuming those order IDs are sequential, and they appear to be, then Apple is selling 20,000 iPads per hour.”

Victor Castroll from the Valcent Financial Group and AAPL Sanity got back to us with some numbers that account for approximately the first 6 hours of sales. Here’s what he tells us:

“We’re at 90k in 6 hours. Keep in mind, this doesn’t include multiple orders but we have some dirty data from regular Apple business which now is about 4k orders out of the 88k orders. So, we estimate Apple has already sold about 90k today, not including in-store reserves.

“$54 million in revenue in a quarter of a day is a great opening. Looks like contrary to much speculation about who would actually want one of these, like the iPhone, people are voting with their wallets. Considering these are just pre-orders for a product still three weeks out, iPad is home run.”

So the word is Apple sold around 90,000 iPad's on Day 1. These are rather impressive numbers, let's see what will Apple think of next.