Apple's New iPad Arrives: Tech Weekly Recap

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Apple's new iPad hit U.S. stores early on Friday, with analysts predicting massive sales of the company's latest tablet.

Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley, for example, expects that Apple will ship well over a million iPads this weekend. The analyst also expects Apple to ship a total of 12.5 million iPads during its March quarter, up from 4.69 million in the same period last year.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster recently said that Apple could sell more than a million iPads on Friday alone, citing the company's previous product launches.

Unveiled in a blaze of publicity in San Francisco last week, the new iPad boasts a high-resolution Retina Display and the capability to run on high-speed 4G LTE networks from the likes of AT&T and Verizon .

The first "teardown" of the new device appeared on Thursday, with Broadcom and Qualcomm among the big component winners.

There was also a hint this week that Apple's next iPhone could be a 4G LTE offering , courtesy of a Verizon Wireless executive.

Shares of Apple, which briefly surpassed $600 for the first time on Thursday, closed at $585.57 on Friday.

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This week was a busy one for tech M&A, with Cisco , Dell and Avaya all opening their wallets.

On Thursday, Cisco confirmed its intent to acquire NDS, a developer of software for multichannel television networks, in a deal worth around $5 billion. The networking giant will use NDS to boost is Videoscape offering, which lets service providers deliver content over multiple devices.

On the same day, Avaya announced its $230 million acquisition of videoconferencing and telepresence specialist Radvision , while on Tuesday, Dell grabbed network security firm SonicWALL for a rumored $1.5 billion.

Cisco shares closed the week up 12 cents, or 0.6%, at $20.03, while Dell was down 5 cents, or 0.29%, at $17.30.

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On Monday, Yahoo! filed a lawsuit against its long-standing partner, Facebook, accusing the social networking giant of patent infringement.

The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in San Jose, Calif., details patents related to messaging, social networking, privacy, customization and advertising.

Facebook expressed surprise at Yahoo!'s legal action in an email to TheStreet. "We're disappointed that Yahoo's effort to engage with us was limited to a few short phone calls and that we continue to learn of new developments about a long-time partner through the press," explained a spokesman. "We will defend ourselves vigorously against these puzzling actions."

In other Yahoo! news, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, whose Third Point LLC owns more than 70.5 million shares of the Internet giant, plans to launch a proxy battle to get his slate of four nominees onto the company's board.

Yahoo!'s stock was up 30 cents, or 1.98%, to $15.18 on Friday.

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Sprint announced on Friday that it is walking away from the spectrum-hosting agreement it signed with LightSquared in June 2011. The move also signals that Sprint may move closer to its other 4G partner, Clearwire .

Shares of Sprint ended the week up 9 cents, or 3.21%, at $2.89, while Clearwire was up 12 cents, or 5.58%, at $2.27.

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For the coming week EMC will be hosting a news conference on Tuesday related to its Greenplum big data analytics division. Database giant Oracle announces its third-quarter results after market close on the same day.

-- Written by James Rogers in New York.

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