An interesting story reaches us about the launch of the Apple iPad and the chances of its sales outdoing that of the iPhone’s original sales, with one online bookmaker saying the odds are firmly against it. Apparently it took 74 days for the iPhone to reach the one million sales mark after it went on sale in June 2007.

The iPad tablet coming on April 3 has a 72% probability of not taking as many sales as the iPhone initially did, despite all the ongoing and never-ending hype according to YouWager.com. Ireland’s largest bookmaker, Paddy Power, has odds of 3-1 that sales of the iPad will go past 6 million in 2010 with 8-1 odds that sales won’t get to one million.

There doesn’t seem to me much chance that iPad sales won’t reach the million mark this year when we hear that Apple have already taken hundreds of thousands of pre-orders for it. According to businessweek.com a modern day benchmark for consumer technology is sales of a million units in 74 days.

The Nexus One apparently sold around 135,000 units in 74 days whilst the Motorola Droid, similar to the iPhone managed to hit the magic million in the benchmark time. Apple has now sold more than 42 million iPhones in total. Do you think the iPad has any chance of hitting the benchmark for sales and are you one of the people eagerly awaiting it?