History and availability

Development of iPhone began with Apple CEO Steve Jobs' direction that Apple engineers investigate touchscreens.[14] Apple created the device during a secretive and unprecedented collaboration with AT&T Mobility—Cingular Wireless at the time—at a development cost of US$150 million over thirty months. Apple rejected the "design by committee" approach that had yielded the Motorola ROKR E1, a largely unsuccessful collaboration with Motorola. Instead, Cingular gave Apple the liberty to develop the iPhone's hardware and software in-house. Numerous codenames and even fake prototypes were devised to keep the project secret.[15][16]

Jobs unveiled iPhone to the public on January 9, 2007 in a keynote address. Apple was required to file for operating permits with the FCC, but such filings are available to the public, so the announcement came several months before the iPhone received approval. The iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007. Apple closed its stores at 2:00 pm local time to prepare for the 6:00 pm iPhone launch, while hundreds of customers lined up at stores nationwide.[1] On launch weekend, Apple sold 270,000 iPhones in the first thirty hours.[17] The original iPhone was made available in the UK, France, and Germany in November 2007, and Ireland and Austria in spring of 2008.

On July 11, 2008, Apple released the iPhone 3G in twenty-two countries, including the original six.[18] Forty-eight more are expected to follow in the months afterwards.[19] Apple sold 1 million iPhone 3Gs in its first 3 days on sale,[20] enough to overload Apple's United States iTunes servers.

Over 3 million units were sold in the first month after the 3G launch, in a "blistering sales pace". The phenomenon of popular willingness to upgrade to the 3G so soon after purchase of an earlier model was attributed to Apple's popularity and its frequent imitators.[22] The anomalously high demand for the first-generation iPhone was reflected in free-market prices for older models that began to rise steadily within days of the 3G launch resetting the price baselines.[23]

On January 21, 2009, Apple announced sales of 4.36 million iPhone 3Gs in the first quarter of fiscal 2009, ending December 2008, totaling 17.4 million iPhones to date.[24] Sales from Q4 2008 surpassed RIM's BlackBerry sales of 5.2 million units, making Apple the third largest mobile phone manufacturer by revenue, after Nokia and Samsung.[25] While iPhone sales constitute a significant portion of Apple's revenue, some of this income is deferred.
source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

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