Apple front man, Steve Jobs, said that the company hopes to sell its one millionth iPhone by the end of the third quarter, taking it to one tenth of its goal.
Jobs made the projection on Wednesday, during the company’s financial results presentation for the quarter to end June 30. Figures were typically healthy – revenues of $5.41bn and net profit of $818m, compared to revenues of $4.37bn and net profit of $472m in the year ago quarter.
“iPhone is off to a great start-we hope to sell our one-millionth iPhone by the end of its first full quarter of sales – and our new product pipeline is very strong,” Jobs said.
Apple revealed it sold 270,000 iPhones in first 30 hours the product was on sale and earlier this week, exclusive iPhone carrier AT&T, revealed that it had activated 146,000 iPhone subs in the first two days of the device’s launch.
Presumably this means 124,000 devices bought were not activated within the first two days. Maybe this is an indication of the number of extra devices people bought in anticipation of stocks running dry and a prospective grey market to fuel.
We managed to get our hands on a couple of devices in the wild this week and can verify that UK consumers are buying the devices and hacking them to sidestep the AT&T activation procedure. Although this doesn’t mean the phone can be used on another network it does allow it to be used as an iPod/wifi terminal/attention grabber.
In the few minutes we had to play with a roaming device, our biggest concern was the connection speed. Without 3G connectivity, the web browsing experience is excruciatingly slow and would potentially damage the devices attractiveness to the European market. That said, expectation is rife that the second generation iPhone, expected to hit Europe in December, will pack a 3G punch.
As for Job’s goal of 1 million units within the next three months, well if the success of the iPod is anything to go by, it should be a walk in the park. The company sold 9.8 million iPods during the quarter, representing 21 per cent growth over the year ago quarter.