iPhone News Updated

Apple earnings preview: It’s all about the iPhone 4S

Apple reports its first-quarter earnings tomorrow, and Wall Street’s expecting some record-breaking numbers all around.

Analysts polled by FactSet predict the company will bring in earnings of $10.04 per share and revenue of $38.92 billion. As usual, that’s well above the $9.30 a share on $37 billion Apple forecasted at the end of its last quarter.

There will be a lot to chew on with tomorrow’s numbers, which should come in shortly after the close of trading. But the big one to look at is how many iPhones the company sold.

This is the first quarter to include sales of the iPhone 4S, which hit shelves in mid-October. All indications have been that it’s Apple’s best-selling phone yet, though the company has not provided new data on that since boasting sales of 4 million iPhone 4S units in its first weekend.

Fortune scooped together a collection of 22 estimates from Wall Street analysts, who averaged a guess of 29.74 million iPhones sold. How does that stack up to the same quarter last year? Apple sold 16.24 million units, which in itself was an 86 percent increase year over year. If Apple met the near-30 million estimate for this quarter, that would be about an 83 percent increase this time around.

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IPhone Scarcity During Chinese New Year May Benefit Samsung

Apple Inc. is missing out on Chinese New Year sales and giving competitors a potential boost after pulling all iPhones from company stores during the nation’s most important gift-giving season.

Apple stopped selling all handsets at its five China outlets on Jan. 13 after customers pelted the flagship store in Beijing with eggs because it wouldn’t open on the first day of sales for the iPhone 4S. The online store in China also sold out of the device.

The one-week holiday, which begins Jan. 23, generated $64 billion in retail sales last year, according to government statistics. Clearing iPhones from shelves in the 10 days leading into the Year of the Dragon may help Samsung Electronics Co. and other competitors using Google Inc.’s Android software increase their footholds in the world’s largest mobile-phone market.

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