The iPad has made a huge splash in a very short time, and this in spite of only being available in the United States. Now that its release in other countries is getting closer every day, where is anticipation the hottest? Which countries are the most interested in the iPad?

This is one area where Google can come to the rescue of Apple (something we haven’t seen much of lately). Google Insights for Search can show the “regional interest” for various terms. When a brand name is involved, like the iPad, it becomes very useful since it will be same all over the world and will reflect interest in that brand or product. We used this tool to research the overall global interest in the iPad, and also where in the United States it’s most popular.

To make sure that this survey is as up to date as possible, we only used data from the last 30 days, i.e. from the week before the iPad launch until today.

Worldwide interest in the iPad

With the exception of the US, you’d be hard pressed to correctly guess where the interest in the iPad is the highest. The results are far from obvious, as you will see.

Above: Interest in iPad, region by region, worldwide, the last 30 days.

Top 10 countries in terms of iPad interest

1. United States
2. Hong Kong
3. Singapore
4. Puerto Rico
5. South Korea
6. Taiwan
7. Kuwait
8. Norway
9. United Arab Emirates
10. Philippines

(Yes, we know Hong Kong isn’t a country per se, but Google lists it as its own “region”.)

USA is at the top here, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering it’s the only place the device has actually launched so far.

A closer look at interest in the iPad inside the US

Now that the iPad has successfully launched in the United States, where has the device become most popular, or to be more precise in this case, where has it generated the most interest?

Above: Interest in iPad, state by state, USA, the last 30 days.

Top 10 US states in terms of iPad interest

1. Hawaii
2. Alaska
3. Utah
4. Delaware
5. Rhode island
6. Oregon
7. Nevada
8. New Mexico
9. New Hampshire
10. Idaho

Yes, that’s right. The iPad has apparently garnered a huge amount of interest from the people of Hawaii.

Aloha.

It’s interesting that the two “extremes” (in terms of climate) of Hawaii and Alaska are the two top US regions in terms of iPad interest. Talk about polar opposites.

Looking just at cities the top result is a bit more predictable, with the Silicon Valley-infused San Francisco leading the pack.

Top 10 US cities in terms of iPad interest

1. San Francisco
2. Pleasanton
3. Minneapolis
4. Austin
5. New York
6. San Diego
7. Denver
8. Boston
9. Los Angeles
10. Seattle

Final words

These are the results for now…

Once the iPad has been launched in the rest of the world and Apple’s marketing machine has pumped up the iPad buzz in those regions to an even greater degree than today, the results of this survey may change a lot.

It’s no secret that many countries outside the US have a lot of people who eagerly await their chance to try out the iPad. So much, in fact, that many won’t even wait until it’s officially launched. For example, we have an imported iPad here in the Pingdom office, and we know of several people among our friends here in Sweden that already have one.

Note: All these values from Google are normalized, i.e. they are adjusted depending on the size of the population (or number of searches). In this case you can think of it as interest relative to population size.

Perceptions matter, and the perception of Nokia in the news, on the web, and in the minds of many, is that things aren’t going that well. Even in the Pingdom office, we hear “Nokia is doomed,” but do the numbers support this belief?

Looking at the statistics, Symbian leads the mobile operating system race with just over 30% of web browsing traffic. That’s down slightly from late last year, when we noted that Symbian finished 2011 as the top mobile operating system, with almost 34% of the mobile OS market.

What is even more interesting, however, is that Nokia is also ahead when we look at figures for all the mobile handset vendors. In fact, Nokia is way ahead of Apple, and Android lags far behind.

Read more

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we talk mainly about Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Some fresh research shows an increase in smaller, more targeted DDoS attacks, and hacker group Anonymous has vowed to take down the Internet by launching a DDoS attack on the 13 root DNS servers.

Read more

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on OpenStack.

Read more

By some measures, more than 7 billion people now inhabit the world, and more than a third of us are on the Internet. But how many are added each day, each week, or each minute? We think we have a pretty good idea.

Read on for some pretty amazing numbers.

Read more

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we can finally talk about Saleh’s Carbon for Windows Phone app being available in Windows Marketplace. We also talk to Rich Brueckner of InsideHPC.com about the world of supercomputers.

Read more