NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Apple Inc., trying to revive demand for tablet-style computers with its iPad, said it sold more than 300,000 of the devices on the first day of their debut weekend.

The number includes preorders, sales at Apple stores and deliveries to retail partners on April 3, the company said yesterday in a statement. Users downloaded more than one million iPad applications from Apple's site and bought more than 250,000 electronic books from its online store during the first day.

With the iPad, Apple is trying to build on the success of its iPhone and iPod music player and popularise computers in the middle ground between smartphones and laptops. The company is betting the iPad design is enticing enough to prompt consumers to pay a premium over low-cost notebooks and netbooks. Rivals such as Microsoft Corp. have failed to turn tablets into must-have consumer devices.

"It was a good number," said Jeff Fidacaro, an analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group in New York, who recommends buying Apple shares and doesn't own any. He said the initial sales were in line with his estimate. The company may sell 850,000 iPads in the quarter ending in June as developers start to build "apps ported specifically for this platform," Fidacaro said. The company said there were already more than 1,000 applications, or apps, written specifically for the iPad. Few analysts had published their sales estimates for the debut weekend, underscoring how difficult it is to predict demand for what Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said is a new mobile-device category. Analysts had said they didn't have a good sense of how consumers would respond to the iPad, an untested computer type.

"What you're looking at here is a brand-new category," said Yair Reiner, an analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. in New York. "A lot of people in line on Saturday morning weren't sure what they were in line for."

Users can surf the Internet, peruse digital books, watch video and play games on the touch-screen iPad. Tablets have been available in one form or another since the 1990s, without ever catching on. They account for less than 1 percent of the personal-computer market, according to researcher Gartner Inc.

Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's largest PC maker, also has ambitions in the market. The company released a video teaser today showing off its touch-screen slate device, which it plans to start selling this year.