Apple to Sell 25 Million iPhones by Year's End?

If recent reports are any indicator, Apple is planning on producing an iPhone 5 -- and there will be a lot of them to be sold.

A report from The Wall Street Journal said Apple expects to sell 25 million iPhones before the year is over. The report cites unnamed sources at Apple's suppliers. Apple's products are assembled at Hon Hai, which is a contract manufacturer in Taiwan. The sources also said there will be an 8-megapixel camera and a thinner design. It will also use wireless baseband chips from Qualcomm from the typical Infineon chips.

On top of this report, research firm Digitimes recently said Taiwan based notebook maker Pegatron Technology has received an order for 15 million iPhone 5s to be shipped by September of 2011. Digitimes said this comes from upstream component maker sources.

That report says the iPhone 5 does not seem to have any major update from iPhone 4. Pegatron, which is an original equipment manufacturer, did not comment on the report. The company did recently receive and handle an order for 10 million CDMA iPhone 4s. However, the phones did not sell as well as predicted, with just under four million being shipped.

This production problem could explain why there was no June iPhone announcement, as is usually the case. Both reports indicate the update in September will not be a major one which gives credence to other rumors that say next June's iPhone announcement will be much bigger. The report from The Journal said the iPhone 6, or whatever comes out next year, will have wireless charging. Some analysts have even speculated that the September phone will the iPhone 4S.

The two recent reports fall in line with several other iPhone 5 launch date predictions. Most Apple analysts agree that sometime in September, the company will launch the next generation of its iPhone. Whether or not this will be a major upgrade, or just a slightly better version of the iPhone 4, is still unknown.

The iPhone 5 could be coming out at a good time for Apple, which has faced increasing pressure from Samsung and other smartphone manufacturer rivals. The Samsung Galaxy S2 phone came out in late April and since then Samsung says they have sold three million of them. Today, Motorola introduced the Droid 3, which is a faster and bigger version of previous generations.

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