The web is awash with stories of how the iPhone has missed its sales targets in the UK, but the more negative pieces seem to be expressing a certain amount of glee with the information.

In a piece in the Financial Times, someone “familiar with the situation” states that O₂ has shifted 190,000 iPhones in the two months since it went on sale in November. The target, apparently, was 200,000 units, which means O₂ is 10,000 iPhones short – or just 5%.

Now any missed target is obviously a bad thing in business, but at the risk of sounding like an Apple apologist, is missing it by 5% (assuming those figures are correct – neither Apple nor O₂ will comment) really deserving of headlines with the words “disappoint” and “fails to impress”?

The figures are certainly well short of some of the wild predictions issued by analysts before the UK launch, but the iPhone was never going to experience the same sort of sales success here as it did in the US. UK buyers are far happier to have the up-front cost of a mobile phone hidden in the monthly payments ("FREE!*", in other words...), although the iPhone looks far more reasonable if you subtract the £199 cost of an 8Gb iPod Touch from its £269 price tag.

If O₂ is feeling any disappointment at missing its iPhone targets, it’s bound to be mitigated by one less obvious aspect of the exclusive deal with Apple. O₂ stores apparently experienced a three-fold increase in traffic during the iPhone’s first eight on-sale period, and while not everyone who walked in to a store walked out with a new Apple handset, it’s unlikely that all of them walked out empty-handed.

O₂ will report its 2007 results at the end of February, so we’ll have to wait a little while before we all know for sure how well it’s really done from the iPhone.

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