Apple iPhone To Hit 10m? Market Share Grows to 55% Since 3G Launch

Gregg Keizer of Computerworld.com writes that Apple has now officially taken the lead in the consumer smart phone market in the U.S., a market which was in a Blackberry stranglehold before this summer. This is a trend which is echoed, of course, around the globe, with sales of the 3G continuing to climb everywhere.

Jason O’Grady of ZDnet wrote Monday that, through a joint project of AFB and Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity board, iPhone IMEI numbers have been collected on a Google spreadsheet. This is the same method that was used about a month ago by the London-based investor who calls himself “Tommo_UK”, who then reported that Apple had sold about 8 million iPhones. Using this method, it has now been determined that Apple has apparently surpassed all analysts estimates — no big surprise there — and has now built over 10 million iPhones.

O’Grady writes, “Don’t expect a press release from Apple yet though, these are iPhone manufacturing numbers, not sales numbers.”

Also writing about this for Bullish Cross on Monday, Andy Zaky and Turley Muller have made exciting predictions about what Apple might be telling investors and market watchers when its quarterly earnings are reported at the end of this month. They believe that Apple has sold a considerably higher number of iPhones last quarter than any of even the most bullish analysts anticipated.

They write, “even if a whopping 1.5 million iPhones of the total IMEI registered devices are unsold as of today, an unlikely assumption, it would still put 3G iPhone sales at 7.6 million units.”

So? Here’s why it matters. Coming into this fourth quarter, 2.42 million first generation iPhones had already sold. If last months IMEI data is factored in, and added to Zaky and Muller’s analysis, then Apple has reached the goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008, with a comfortable three months to spare.