iPad launch weekend news round-up

Estimated 700,000 units sold, jailbreak completed in one day, fake Facebook app, and more

Unless you've been living under a rock the past couple weeks, you know that all the biggest technology-related news of the past week revolved around the Saturday launch of Apple's long-lusted after tablet computer, the iPad. Here we aggregate all the most noteworthy bits to come out from the iPad's momentous launch weekend.

--Financially, the most interesting news of the weekend is that Apple may have sold upwards of 700,000 units of the iPad on day one alone, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. Late last week, a Bernstein Research report led by Toni Sacconaghi, Jr. predicted the sale of 300,000-400,000 iPads over the weekend and Munster himself predicted the sale of 300,000 units. After launch day had ended, however, Munster revised his estimate to somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000. It will be interesting to see, once Apple gives official numbers, how the iPad fared against the iPhone, which Apple sold 270,000 of at the product's launch.

--While Apple was cheering high sales quantities, hackers and more tech-savvy customers were probably cheering on the efforts of iPhone Dev-Team member MuscleNerd, who revealed that he had jailbroken the iPad in a single day. Jailbreaking an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad allows the user to override restrictions on the device imposed by Apple, enabling the installation of unapproved software. The hack was achieved relatively quickly because it was a minor variation on the latest jailbreak for the iPhone, which exposed a browser-based vulnerability.

--As the App Store swelled with new apps designed specifically for the iPad and old iPhone apps newly tailored for the device's large screen, at least one developer was making a ton of money from an app that took advantage of a major Web service's slowness at launching an application. Facebook Ultimate, currently the only Facebook app available on the store, is definitely not an official app. But it has a logo very similar to the official one, supposedly provides mobile Facebook access, and, at $2.99, was recently in the top ten paid apps of the store. Facebook has not yet made an official response.

--Apple CEO Steve Jobs took a moment on Saturday to walk among the iPad fanatics at the Palo Alto Apple Store.

--The iPad is definitely faster than the iPhone 3G S, according to benchmarks posted by Craig Hockenberry, developer of the Twitterrific Twitter app. As far as native applications go, the iPad in some cases ran twice as fast, good news for users looking to play games or other processor-intensive apps on their new tablet.