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Apple said Friday its eagerly awaited iPad tablet computer will go on sale in US stores on April 3 and in other countries in late April, slightly later than originally announced.
Unveiling the touchscreen multi-media device on January 27, the California company behind the iPod, iPhone and Macintosh computer had said the iPad would be "available in late March worldwide."
Apple said it would be accepting pre-orders from US customers at its online store from March 12 for the iPad, which allows users to watch video, listen to music, play games, surf the Web or read electronic books.
The iPad also runs most of the 150,000 applications made for the iPod music player and the iPhone. Apple said Friday the device would come with "12 new innovative apps designed especially for iPad."
The iPad model featuring Wi-Fi wireless connectivity will be available in Apple's US stores from April 3 and the model which offers both Wi-Fi and 3G cellular connectivity in late April, Apple said.
The company said both the Wi-Fi and 3G models will be available in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and Switzerland in late April and in additional countries later this year.
Apple said international pricing will be announced in April.
The slight delay in availability did not appear to concern investors on Wall Street and Apple shares hit a record high of 219.70 dollars at one point.
Apple shares were up 3.94 percent at 219.01 dollars at 3:00 pm (2000 GMT) in New York.
"iPad is something completely new," Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said in a statement.
"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," Jobs said.
Apple did not provide any explanation for the delay of the iPad, which an analyst with Canaccord Adams, Peter Misek, attributed earlier this week to "an unspecified production problem" at an iPad manufacturer in Taiwan.
Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty forecast iPad sales of six million units this year, a figure she acknowledged was above the "consensus" of between three and four million units.
The iPad has a 9.7-inch (24.6-centimeter) color screen and resembles an oversized iPhone. It is 0.5 inches (1.3 centimeters) thick, weighs 1.5 pounds (0.7 kilos) and comes with 16, 32, or 64 gigabytes of memory.
Apple has been pushing the iPad's abilities as an e-book reader and analysts have described the color screen device as a potential rival to Amazon's Kindle.
Apple said its new iBookstore will include books from the New York Times best-seller list and a number of publishers including Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster.
Apple said the iBooks application for the iPad will be available as a free download from the App Store in the United States on April 3 and in other countries later this year.
The cheapest iPad model, with Wi-Fi connectivity and 16GB of memory, is 499 dollars while the most expensive -- which includes 3G connectivity and 64GB of memory -- costs 829 dollars.
Unveiling the iPad in January, Apple CEO Jobs hailed it as a "revolutionary" device and said he was taking a gamble by trying to carve out an entirely new product category between the laptop computer and the smartphone.
Reviewers have been mixed on whether the iPad will be a smash hit like the iPod, which controls over 70 percent of the market for MP3 players, or the iPhone, which completely transformed the smartphone arena.
