Report: Apple Planning To Sell 25 Million iPhones In 2011

Apple is set to reportedly release a whole bunch of iPhone 5s according to a report in The Wall St. Journal.

The report said Apple has told its suppliers that it is expecting on selling 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.

These sources also told The Journal that the phone will have an 8-megapixel camera and a thinner design. It will also use wireless baseband chips from Qualcomm.

The 25-million mark is quite high for Apple, but a doable goal. Apple sold three million iPhone 4s in the first three weeks of that phone's release, and that was only on one carrier in the U.S.

Yesterday, research firm Digitimes 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.

The two 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.