I'm in the phone booth / it's the one across the hall

From the NZ Herald today:

AT&T, the telecoms company with which Apple has teamed up to offer its much-hyped new iPod-cum-mobile phone, revealed that it activated 146,000 of the devices in the first two days - the last two days of June.

The number was mentioned as an aside in AT&T's financial results for the second quarter of the year, but it caused an immediate reaction on the stock market, where Apple shares plunged 5 per cent.

Analysts had believed US sales of the iPhone that first weekend had been anything from 300,000 to 700,000. Even allowing that some iPhones may not have been immediately activated - either due to glitches at AT&T or because they were being purchased for resale on eBay - it seems clear that Wall Street had been taken in by the hype surrounding the product's launch.

What a surprise...not....Apple's Zune cometh...