Wal-Mart has said it will begin selling the Apple iPad this week, beginning on October 15th. And if it sells one tablet it will almost certainly end up stocking others. This, sort of, makes tablets official. Wal-Mart said that it would have iPads in around 2,300 of its stores by mid-November, in time for the Blackfriday shopping rush after Thanksgiving.
Devices will also be sold online at the Wal-Mart web site, with a store pickup, and it plans to carry all the different types of iPad, including both Wi-Fi and 3G + Wi-Fi models, at the same prices as Apple.
Wal-Mart is usually last in line to sell new products and this was the same with iPods and iPhones. The difference this time around has been the willingness of rivals to hop on the Tablet bandwagon and source them at both Best Buy (announced three weeks ago) and Target stores which has been selling the iPad for a while now.
Wal-Mart has a total of 8,500 stores in 15 countries (3,600 in the US) and when it took the iPhone in December 2008, there was a significant uptick in Apple sales volumes.
Other reports have it that around half of the Fortune 500 companies are testing iPads for internal use, and many analysts are now estimating sales figures above previous projections at around 21 to 23 million units for 2011.