Apple on a Roll with iPhone, iTouch, iTablet, iNano...

Foxconn Building 800,000 iPhones A Week

from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington

Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant that produces the iPhone 3G for Apple, has ramped up production to 800,000 units per week, says a source close to Apple with direct knowledge of the numbers. This is “above current full capacity” and there may be some concerns with quality control.

Apple sold just 6 million of its first generation iPhones.

Foxconn factories will be able to ramp production up significantly over time, says our source. But at current sell rates, the company is producing iPhones at a run rate of over 40 million units per year, well beyond early estimates of demand for the product of 25 million over the 3G product lifecycle.

Apple is continuing to add countries - the iPhone is available in 23 countries today, and another 50 will be added this year. We’ve heard that Foxconn was initially told to expect sales of up to 40 million units in the first year, but that those numbers are being revised upwards sharply.

About 1 billion mobile phones were sold worldwide in 2007, says Gartner (Nokia sold about 435 million of them)...

iPhone Nano: The perfect stocking stuffer or lump of coal?

from VentureBeat by MG Siegler

While many people out there are clamoring for what would essentially be a larger iPhone, the Mac Tablet, others are thinking they want a smaller device. The latter group may get their wish this holiday season, as Apple is supposedly prepping an “iPhone Nano,” according to the UK’s Daily Mail.

Citing an “industry source,” the Mail says such a product is expected to launch before Christmas and would be available to pay-as-you-go customer’s through O2, the UK’s iPhone provider. The report goes so far as to say that such a device could be 150 British pounds (about $300).

Unfortunately, the story says little else of worth. It has one “expert” predicting that such a device would have a touch wheel on the back and a display on the front, “so that numbers would be dialled from behind.” To me that makes little sense and such a device might even be more expensive to produce than the current iPhone.

This report follows rumors that Apple is prepping its supposed Mac Tablet or “MacBook Touch” for launch this fall. That talk began to heat up after Apple chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer mentioned several times during Apple’s quarterly earnings call that a “future product transition” was a key factor in its lower guidance for the fourth quarter. This presumably could be a new product that would be expensive to make and yet wouldn’t be sold at a huge mark-up.

So which product will be coming soon, the big one or the small one?