CUPERTINO, Calif., Oct 17, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Apple(R) today announced it has sold over four million of its new iPhone(R) 4S, just three days after its launch on October 14. In addition, more than 25 million customers are already using iOS 5, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, in the first five days of its release, and more than 20 million customers have signed up for iCloud(R), a breakthrough set of free cloud services that automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices. iPhone 4S is available today in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, and will be available in 22 more countries on October 28 and more than 70 countries by the end of the year.

“iPhone 4S is off to a great start with more than four million sold in its first weekend–the most ever for a phone and more than double the iPhone 4 launch during its first three days,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “iPhone 4S is a hit with customers around the world, and together with iOS 5 and iCloud, is the best iPhone ever.”

iPhone 4S is the most amazing iPhone yet, packed with incredible new features including Apple’s dual-core A5 chip for blazing fast performance and stunning graphics; an all new camera with advanced optics; full 1080p HD resolution video recording; and Siri(TM), an intelligent assistant that helps you get things done just by asking.

Pricing & Availability

iPhone 4S comes in either black or white and is available in the US for a suggested retail price of $199 (US) for the 16GB model, $299 (US) for the 32GB model and $399 (US) for the new 64GB model.* iPhone 4S is available from the Apple Online Store, Apple’s retail stores and through AT&T, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, and select Best Buy, Target and Walmart stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers. iPhone 4 is available for just $99 (US) and iPhone 3GS is available for free with a two year contract.

iPhone 4S will be available on October 28 in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

*Qualified customers only. Requires a new two year rate plan, sold separately.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced iPad 2 which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

NOTE TO EDITORS: For additional information visit Apple’s PR website ( www.apple.com/pr ), or call Apple’s Media Helpline at (408) 974-2042.

(C) 2011 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, iPhone, iCloud and Siri are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

To mark the passing of Steve Jobs, Apple Inc. co-founder, a memorial service was held at Stanford University Sunday. It attracted hundreds of his colleagues and admirers.

Wall Street Journal reported that, the private evening service was notable for the heavy security presence and details of the event were scarce. Attendees were served food in an outdoors setting next to the campus chapel and invited guests.

“This is security like you’d see for a presidential visit – maybe tighter,” retired San Mateo County Superior Court Judge John Runde, who happened by for his weekly campus walk with his wife Joyce said.

The mourners included Google Chief Executive Officer Larry Page, media executive Rupert Murdoch, former Vice President Al Gore, and Adobe co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, among scores of Silicon Valley elite and the politically powerful such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and celebrities such as actor Tim Allen.

UPI.com reported California Gov. Jerry Brown had declared Sunday as “ Day” across the state, he said, “In his life and work, Steve Jobs embodied the California dream.” He added, “To call him influential would be an understatement. His innovations transformed an industry, and the products he conceived and shepherded to market have changed the way the entire world communicates. Most importantly, his vision helped put powerful technologies, once the exclusive domain of big business and government, in the hands of ordinary consumers.”

Apple’s iOS-based iPad still rules the tablet market but not for want of trying by competitors like Google, Research in Motion, Motorola, Samsung, and, once-upon-a-time, Hewlett-Packard. But figuring out just how broad Apple’s lead in the market is can be difficult.

Apple itself is up front about its iPad and iPad 2 sales figures—for example, the company says it sold 9.25 million iPads in its fiscal third quarter, according to its most recent earnings report. It’s not nearly as easy to put a number on the amount of non-iOS tablets that have been sold in that or any other quarter.

That’s because the other major tablet makers out there don’t generally issue sales figures, but rather talk about shipment numbers. And when they talk about sales numbers, those numbers aren’t very pretty. Apple essentially sells every tablet it makes to an end user, but to try to match that perfect return rate, companies like HP and RIM have had to offer steep discounts on their tablets to unload inventory that wasn’t selling at the original price.

Or take Android-based tablets. Google supplies the operating system for those devices, but companies like Samsung, Asus, Acer, Motorola, and Amazon build the hardware. You’d have to mix and match figures often buried deep in financial statements from several different companies just to get an idea of how many Android tablets are out in the wild and not just sitting on a pallet in some warehouse.

Adding up the Android Numbers
Now SlashGear has offered up a seemingly simpler way to get that number and it turns out that there are roughly 3.4 million Android tablets that have been sold to end users up to this point.

Except that’s not precisely true—there are certainly more, but maybe not all that many. What SlashGear does to get its 3.4 million figure (which is dwarfed by the 30 million or so iPads that Apple had sold as of this past summer, by the way) is to reconcile Google CEO Larry Page’s recent statement that 190 million Android devices have been activated in total with Google’s latest platform version stats, which put the percentage of devices accessing the Android Market in the past two weeks while running Android Honeycomb 3.0, 3.1, or 3.2 at 1.8 percent.

And voila! You arrive at the number 3.4 million. And the nice thing about that number is that it points to tablets that are actively accessing the Android Market and thus in the hands of users—though we suppose there could be some small amount of Android tablets out there that access Google’s app portal as floor models in various retail stores or otherwise are live devices without being sold.

Slash Gear does point out a couple of reasons why the 3.4 million figure is almost certainly a low-ball guess. For one thing, Honeycomb isn’t the only version of Android being used to run tablets. It’s just the only one built exclusively for tablets, thus making it possible to parse out as representing tablets specifically via Google’s platform version stats.

Samsung’s first Galaxy Tab runs Android 2.2 Froyo or 2.3 Gingerbread, for example. Since those versions of Android are also used on smartphones, it’s tough to draw out the tablets running Froyo or Gingerbread versus smartphones running those flavors of Android from Google’s platform version stats.

Amazon’s upcoming Kindle Fire also runs a heavily modified version of Gingerbread. While the Kindle Fire won’t actually ship until Nov. 15, it’s been reported that more than 250,000 of the $199 tablets had been purchased in just the first five days after Amazon made them available for pre-order. If that level of demand keeps up, the number of Android tablets sold could be doubled before the year is out—or better, with the holiday season coming up.

Another problem with just relying on Google’s own Android version stats is that not all Android Honeycomb tablets are Google certified, as Slash Gear points out. Some use third-party app stores, such as Amazon’s and so wouldn’t be counted in Google’s own statistics.

Who’s Challenging Apple?
Even so, the north of 3.4 million number of Android-based tablets sold, even when added on to smaller but not insignificant sales of tablets running RIM’s QNX, HP’s webOS, MeeGo, and other operating systems, still comes up far short of Apple’s iPad sales figures.

Gartner has projected worldwide sales of tablets to end users for all of 2011 in the neighborhood of 64 million units. The research firm reckons iPads running Apple’s iOS will account for about 47 million of those unit sales or 73.4 percent of the market, sales of tablets running Android will number 11 million, RIM’s QNX-based BlackBerry PlayBook will account for 3 million sales, HP’s discontinued webOS-based TouchPad for 2 million, and devices running MeeGo and other OSes for about 850,000 more unit sales.

Right now, those numbers seem overly optimistic for all the companies named—yes, Apple included—even with the holidays coming up and even adding the highly anticipated entry of Amazon’s Kindle Fire to the mix.

RIM in particular seems like it will be hard-pressed to get to even half of the sales Gartner is projected for QNX tablets, though the company is reportedly set to release a much-needed update to its OS next week that could attract more business for its PlayBook. HP, meanwhile, is just clearing out inventory and it’s tough to see how it sells 2 million units of a tablet it won’t even be making before the year is out.

Here are a couple of loose conclusions based on all of the above information. First, the tablet market just isn’t as big or growing as fast as many thought it would be at this point (though we will watch Amazon’s Kindle Fire closely and also look forward to Microsoft’s release of a tablet-friendly Windows 8 OS next year). Second, Android is making slow-but-steady inroads into an iOS-dominated tablet market, perhaps resembling the way Google and its partners began to chip away at Apple’s iPhone market share for a few years before finally surpassing it.

Gartner predicts that Apple’s share of the global tablet market won’t fall below 50 percent until sometime in 2014, though the iPad-maker would still be the single biggest player in that market through at least 2015, according to the research firm.

Maybe. But even if the non-iOS tablet numbers look fairly fragile compared to Apple’s robust iPad figures right now, those numbers aren’t merely a “rounding error” when compared with Apple’s books, as some of the Cupertino company’s more fanatical followers like to gloat.

And it does seem possible that the right combination of tablet offerings from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other players could turn up the heat on Apple sooner than a lot of people think.