Apple sells 1 million iPhones in first 3 days

Apple Inc. sold 1 million iPhones in the three days after the debut of a faster model, more than double some analysts’ estimates.

Half of Apple’s stores in the U.S. had sold out by Sunday, while carriers in Britain, Germany and Japan said many shops ran out the first day.

“This is definitely a faster start than we anticipated,” Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Gene Munster said. “Demand in the 20 or so countries where essentially they started selling them for the first time must have been phenomenal -- we far underestimated what happened there.”

Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs is using the latest iPhone, which has better audio quality than the first and works on a faster network, to win customers from Research in Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry and Palm Inc.’s Treo.

Palm on Monday introduced a new version of its Treo, which sells for about $250 through Sprint Nextel Corp. Sprint, the third-biggest U.S. wireless carrier, also sells Samsung Electronics Co.’s Instinct smart phone, which it dubbed an “iPhone killer” during the device’s debut last month.

“The iPhone is creating demand, not just siphoning it from others,” Yair Reiner, an analyst with Oppenheimer & Co. in New York.

Jobs said it took 74 days to sell a million of the original iPhone, which was only available in the U.S. when it was released in June 2007. Apple sold 270,000 in the first two days of that model’s debut.