• Fortune, Tuesday, October 12, 2010 12:45 PM

Middle America, here we come! Later this week, Walmart says it plans to start selling the iPad. By mid-November, the retail giant expects to have Apple's popular tablet devices in 2,300 stores nationwide. "With displays in BestBuy, Target and now Walmart, Apple is going for the holiday gift market," writes Fortune. "When you add Walmart to the 221 U.S. Apple Stores, 1,093 BestBuy outlets and 1,743 Target stores carrying the device, that brings to more than 5,300 the number of places Americans can buy a loved one the gift of an iPad this year (hint, hint)."

The extremely popular devices can also be ordered online at Amazon, where they are selling for anywhere from $75 to $88 above list price, according to Fortune. According to recently findings by Bernstein Research, the iPad's current sales rate is about 4.5 million units per quarter -- blowing past the one million units the iPhone sold in its first quarter, and the 350,000 units sold in the first year by the DVD player, i.e., the most quickly adopted non-phone electronic product ever.

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