Apple Inc. said Monday it plans to begin official sales of the iPad tabletcomputer this week in China, the company's latest move to expand its retail offerings in a market it had long neglected.

Apple said that Wi-Fi models of the iPad will be available to customers through its two Apple stores in China and through authorized resellers, beginning Friday at 10 a.m. Until now, users in China have bought unauthorized imports of iPads through the country's flourishing 'gray market,' in which prices are high.

The iPad's price will be higher in China than in the U.S. Apple said it will charge from 3,988 yuan ($590), for the 16-gigabyte iPad, to 5,588 yuan ($826), for the 64-gigabyte model. That's a premium of about 18% over the U.S. price of between $499 and $699.

But it's less than the price Chinese users have been paying to buy gray-market iPads, where they sell for as much as $1,000.

The Cupertino, Calif., company plans to open 25 new Apple stores in China by the end of next year, in a push to expand in a market where it has less than 1% share of all personal computer shipments-far less than it enjoys in the U.S.

The iPad may drive more users to Apple's App Store, which isn't as popular among Chinese iPhone users as users elsewhere because it isn't available in Chinese, and because users must have dual-currency credit cards to make purchases in the store. Many users, who have opted to hack their iPhones in order to use them in China, use pirated applications or applications provided by independent application stores instead.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to say when the company might release a version of the iPad with cellular capabilities.

Mobile operator China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd., Apple's iPhone partner in China, has said it is interested in carrying the device.

The planned rollout of the iPad for China comes five months after the tabletcomputerlaunched in the U.S. That's a faster turnaround than for the iPhone, which was released in 2007 in the U.S. but wasn't officiallyreleased in China until last October. When it finally launched in China, the iPhone was sold without wireless Internet capabilities at first because of Chinese regulatory hurdles.

Apple has sold only the iPhone 3G and 3GS in China, and hasn't yet announced plans to launch the iPhone 4. China is the world's largest cellphone market by users and the second largest personal computer market by unit sales, after the U.S.

As of the second quarter, Apple was the fifth-largest smartphone vendor in China with 7.1% of shipments, according to Analysys International.

Nokia Corp. had 27%, Samsung Electronics Co. had 18%, Motorola Inc. had 14%, and Sony Ericsson had 9%. Research firm IDC estimates that 26 million smartphones will be sold in China in 2010.