Hasta La Gadget!

Apple has sold an almost ridiculous 1.7 million iPhone 4 handsets in its opening weekend, running Thursday through Saturday. This breaks every prediction we saw last week, and almost triples the 600,000 pre-orders reported by Apple just a week before the new iPhone went on sale.

“This is the most successful product launch in Apple’s history,” said Steve Jobs in an Apple press release. Even so, pre-ordering glitches and flat-out supply shortages kept Apple from selling even more. Jobs again: “Even so, we apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply.”

The customer pays $200 (16 GB) or $300 (32 GB) for an iPhone 4, but Apple gets more than that from AT&T. To find out how much, let’s take the prices from the few countries where the handsets are sold unlocked — France, Canada and Britain. Converted into U.S. dollars, we get the following:

Taking into account that all Apple products get more expensive as they cross the Atlantic, we’ll be conservative and use the Canadian prices. Taking the mean of the two prices (and rounding them) we get $670 in U.S. dollars. Let’s multiply that by 1.7 million to get Apple’s total sales for the weekend (not counting the newly discounted iPhone 3G or the still-hot iPad). The number? $1,139,000,000, or well over a billion dollars. Not a bad start.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

iPhone 4 Sales Top 1.7 Million [Apple]

See Also:

• Apple Sells 600,000 iPhones Despite 'System Malfunctions,' Orders Suspended
• Apple's iPad Sales Accelerate: 3 Million Sold in 80 Days
• Video: iPhone 4 Looks Gorgeous, But FaceTime Face Plants
• Apple's iPhone 4 Launch Draws Huge Crowds Worldwide

Sorry, we couldn’t wait — having spent 11 hours on the streets waiting for the iPhone 4, it’s only natural to give our precious new toy some extra special care. With the help of iFixit’s teardown guide, we decided to take the plunge with our steaming hot Chinese delivery — a white front cover (with a shiny proximity sensor area above the earpiece), a white back cover (with “XXXXX” marked as the model number, ergo a prototype), and a Retina Display unit. Alas, there weren’t any white buttons in stock at the time, but let’s pretend this black-and-white combo is the new cool. Read on to find out how the surgery went.

P.S. — We’ve had many readers asking where we got the parts, but the link’s already in the post. Knowing some Chinese helps, too.

Continue reading White iPhone 4: early DIY edition, with a touch of black

White iPhone 4: early DIY edition, with a touch of black originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 27 Jun 2010 11:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, this must be one of the most epic “I told you so” moments in the history of consumer electronics. Professor Gert Frølund Pedersen, an antenna expert over at Denmark’s Aalborg University, managed to get his concerns about the iPhone 4’s external antennae on the record a cool two weeks before the phone was even released. In an interview on June 10, the Danish brainbox explained that he wasn’t impressed by Steve Jobs’ promises of better reception, describing external antennas as “old news,” and suggested that contact with fleshlings could result in undesirable consequences to the handset’s reception:

“The human tissue will in any event have an inhibitory effect on the antenna. Touch means that a larger portion of antenna energy becomes heat and lost.”

Machine-translated that may be, but you get the point. Researchers at Gert’s university have already shown that over 90 percent of any phone’s antenna signal can be stifled by holding it in the right place, but he’s highlighting the specific exposure to skin contact as a separate issue to be mindful of. Good to know we’ve got sharp minds out there, and as to his suggested solution, Gert says phones should ideally have two antennae that act in a sort of redundant array, so that when one is blocked, the other can pick up the slack. So, what are we going to do now, Apple?

[Thanks, Andrew]

iPhone 4 antenna problems were predicted on June 10 by Danish professor originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 26 Jun 2010 18:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In this video, an iPhone 4 owner demonstrates how the antenna problem also affects transmission in voice calls. Using only one finger, the voice quality degrades, even dropping completely. He explains the process: More »