What do you know: China Unicom just coughed up some first weekend sales numbers for the iPhone and…well, they’re not much to look at, despite what I said earlier. The carrier sold just 5,000.
The iPhone is finally coming to the world’s most wired country. South Korean regulators on Wednesday cleared the iPhone for sale. Great news for Apple. The South Korean market is a robust one, and analysts say that with the right carrier partner, Cupertino could be looking at first-year sales ranging from 500,000 to two million.
Apple’s iPhone continues to be AT&T’s marquee handset, though the data-guzzling “Hummer of cellphones,” as the New York Times has dubbed it, has inspired widespread customer dissatisfaction with the carrier’s network. Indeed, according to Piper Jaffray, the iPhone 3G and 3GS are AT&T’s top-selling phones.
Sprint best step up its marketing efforts for the Pre because according to Pali Research, demand for Palm’s new device is slowing, and quickly. During the week ending June 26, Pali estimates that Sprint sold 50,000-60,000 Pre handsets. In the weeks that followed, it sold “less than 40,000,” and then, “over 30,000”–again, according to Pali. Now the research outfit says sales have declined by another 5,000 units.
Demand for Apple’s iPhone 3GS, which topped one million handsets sold in its first weekend at market, has surpassed even the company’s presumably aggressive targets. Reporting earnings Tuesday, Apple said it sold 5.2 million iPhones in its third quarter and finally copped to something that’s long been apparent to anyone who’s been keeping an eye on its iPhone availability widget: Demand for the new iPhone 3GS is far outpacing supply.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster was right. The iPhone 3GS didn’t sell as well as the iPhone 3G did during its launch weekend last year. But it did quite a bit better than he thought. In an investment note issued this morning, Munster estimated the company sold 750,000 iPhones over the weekend.
Schiller announces iPhone 3Gs. S is for speed. “This is a really fast iPhone.” Loads apps and Web sites very, very quickly. NYTimes.com loads more than 3x as fast. Schiller says its about 2x faster than the iPhone 3G. As expected, the device features a brand new 3 megapixel autofocus camera. Auto-focus. Auto-white balance. Auto-exposure. Tap-to-focus. Improved low-light sensitivity. Auto-macro. “The best thing about this camera is it also captures video.” 30 FPS VGA with audio. Auto-focus, etc. Quick demo of video shows that quality is impressive. Videos are stored alongside pix in the picture application. Edit and share videos with the tap of a finger. “And if my carrier supports it, I can even send these things via MMS,” Schiller quips in a poke at AT&T.
The Palm Pre officially went on sale this morning, and judging from initial reports–and my experience at a local northern California Sprint store–neither demand or supply was particularly overwhelming. Certainly, lines for the device were far shorter than those that extended from Apple stores for the launches of the iPhone and the iPhone 3G. Arriving outside my local Sprint store about an hour after they first opened, I found not a queue of eager Pre-buyers, but two kids making forts out of a few Pre shipping boxes left outside the store.
Since 2005, the South Korean government has required all cellphones sold in the country to support WIPI (Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability), the country’s cellular middleware platform. And for Apple, as well as other handset manufacturers like Nokia and Sony Ericsson, redesigning their devices to do so is a costly proposition. So costly, in fact, that they didn’t bother, leaving the country’s handset market to Samsung and LG, which now dominate it.
On April 1, 2009, that will all change.
With the holiday consumer binge nearly upon us and lower-income households reportedly turning to Apple’s iPhone 3G as a means of saving money they might otherwise spend on a separate broadband connection and cellphone service, one would think that the company is headed for another blowout quarter. Right? Maybe. Maybe not.
If Apple, as CEO Steve Jobs said yesterday, is now the world’s third largest mobile phone supplier in terms of revenue, what does that mean for AT&T, the exclusive carrier of Apple’s sole mobile phone in the states? Largely good things, according to the company’s third quarter results. The company activated some 2.4 million iPhone 3Gs in the quarter, with about 40 percent of them going to new customers.
“We’re thrilled to report our best quarter ever.” Apple CEO Steve Jobs has uttered those words, or a variation on them, after most of the company’s earnings reports in recent memory. Will he speak them once again Tuesday, when Apple offers the outside world a peak at its financials? Or has the worsening economic crisis and the continued deterioration of consumer confidence stricken them from “Quarterly Earnings Statement” template in Apple PR for the time being?
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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