iPad first day estimate is 120,000 sold, cheapest model the favourite

A team on the Investor Village's AAPL Sanity message board has estimated that nearly 120,000 iPads have already been pre-ordered since Friday.

Based on a sample of 99 orders over 19.5 hours, the team estimates that Apple already has just under 120,000 buyers lined up and ready to receive the new tablet when it hits America on April 3rd.

The team's mathematical wizardry takes into consideration the total number of Apple orders made on Friday (124,596), the average number of orders that Apple receives on a normal day (16,500) and the average number of iPads ordered per customer (1.11). The grand total works out at 119,987 tablets.

Some other interesting data were also revealed. Customers preferred the cheaper, wi-fi only option, which ships on April 3rd, to the more expensive 3G edition by roughly two to one.

Hard drive capacity was more evenly split, but the least expensive 16GB model had a slight preference over the 32GB and 64GB versions.

If predictive sales numbers and charts are your things then head to investor Deagol's blog, who did much of the number crunching for this estimation.