Last year, when Apple unveiled its iPhone and made it available in the U.S. exclusively from AT&T, the debut sent ripples all through the cell-phone industry. Handset maker Palm suffered as consumers swooned for Apple’s phone, according to surveys by consultancy NPD. AT&T benefited by pulling subscribers from rival carriers Alltel and T-Mobile USA.

So will Apple’s new phone, the iPhone 3G, have a similar effect? Early evidence since the new device’s July 11 debut suggests it will have even broader impact, in part considering the entry-level model sells for $199, compared with $499 for the original version. As a rough measure, take last year’s impact and double it. In the first 12 days since the iPhone 3G hit the market, the device sold at twice the rate of its predecessor, according to AT&T, which hasn’t made more recent info available yet. And analysts expect that quick pace to continue for at least a few

months: The iPhone 3G likely sold up to 700,000 units in the few weeks of July alone, estimates Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research. Apple sold about 1.1 million iPhones in all of the third calendar quarter of last year.

Raw sales numbers don’t tell the whole story, however. So far, many of the new model’s purchasers have been existing AT&T subscribers who already own an iPhone. In a survey of more than 100 iPhone 3G buyers conducted in the past two weeks, Chowdhry found that “most of the users are society who are upgrading.” A survey of 328 users that UBS conducted on the iPhone 3G’s launch day in the U.S. and Britain revealed that nearly 37 percent of the new device’s buyers were current iPhone users. The fact that users are replacing their phones after holding them for less than a year is testomony…

Original post by dhiram