The lineups outside the Southgate Apple store continued after the doors opened Friday morning. (CBC)Apple fans in Edmonton lined up for more than eight hours Friday to be among the first people in Canada to buy an iPad.

The tablet computers were made available to consumers in nine countries outside the United States on Friday, eight weeks after their launch on April 5.

Samantha Johnston was near the front of the line at a new Apple store that opened Friday in Southgate Mall.

She and about 50 other shoppers stayed up all night to make sure they could get one.

"More so just for the experience than anything else," she said. "It just seemed like it would be a fun thing to do to be part of getting the first iPads in Canada."

By the time doors opened at 8 a.m., a few hundred people were in line.

Russell Schulz didn't wait in line all night but he was still able to buy an iPad.

"My wife will be travelling this weekend. She wanted to play with it and use it," he said. "We primarily bought it actually as a travel aid for our children for video, for standing in line in security...we have family in Europe so we expect a lot of lineups."

Venkat and Shanta Hegde look at an iPad at the Apple Store in Edmonton's Southgate Mall on Friday. (CBC) Venkat and Shanta Hegde were among the people checking out the new devices.

"I am a fan, because of my children," Shanta Hegde said. Hegde already has an Apple iPod Touch device and wanted to see how the iPad compared.

"She wanted to buy. I told her, let us wait," her husband, Venkat, said, adding he'd like to see if the prices on the tablets come down in the next few months.

Apple sold one million iPads in the first month after its U.S. launch.

Prices for the iPads range from $549 for a 16GB Wi-Fi version to $879 for a 64GB version with Wi-Fi and 3G cellular access.