For anyone who's followed Apple's fortunes over the years, the transformation of the company has been remarkable. And that's not just a statement about its finances – it long ago shook off the "beleaguered" tag of the late 90's – but also describes the core of the company's business.

Ten years ago, it made computers. Now it's the iPod company, and with the incredible results it posted this week, it's probably fairer to call it "the iPhone company". In a year, phones have gone from almost nothing to providing 39% of its revenues. No one else has managed to make this transformation from computer company to consumer electronics business so successfully. But not quite so successful as some web sites would have you believe...

To get an idea of just how big the iPhone 3G launch was it's worth comparing this quarter with the previous one. In the quarter which ran from April to June, Apple sold only 717,000 iPhones, as demand dwindled in anticipation of the 3G model and as it ran its own stocks down. This quarter, the company came close to trebling its previous record for iPhone sales, when in the three months leading up to Christmas 2007 it sold an impressive-sounding 2.3 million phones.

By any standards, this is massive growth. But if you take a look at the circumstances which surround it, it's perhaps not as surprising as it appears at first.

The first thing to consider is coverage. Officially, the first-generation iPhone was available in only a handful of countries, primarily the US, UK, France and Germany. Apple launched the 3G model in 22 countries on the same day, and is expanding this to over 70. This means that the number of people who could potentially buy an iPhone has jumped from around 500 million to something in the region of 2.5 billion. With a jump in availability that high, you're always going to get a big increase in sales.

Secondly, in the markets that the iPhone was already covering, there was significant pent-up demand. The iPhone 3G was announced at the beginning of June, which almost certainly means that sales dried up to nothing for a month while consumers waited for the new model. Effectively, this means Apple has managed to squeeze four months of sales into a single quarter's results - a neat trick, but one which it can't do in every quarter.

This goes part of the way to explaining one of the points brought up by Steve Jobs on the conference call it held to announce its results. According to Jobs, iPhones outsold Blackberry by quite a significant number over the quarter. Here's what Steve Jobs said, in full:

In their most recent quarter, Research in Motion, or RIM, reported selling 6.1 million BlackBerry devices. Compared to our most recent quarter sales of 6.9 million iPhones, Apple outsold RIM last quarter and this is a milestone for us. RIM is a good company that makes good products and so it is surprising that after only 15 months in the market, we could outsell them in any quarter.

There are a couple of points which are worth making. As Joe Wilcox first pointed out, RIM's quarter and Apple's quarter don't cover the same period – Apple's ends 27th September, RIM's 30th August – which means that you can't really make a like-with-like comparison here.

But even if you could, it's worth bearing in mind how circumstances surrounding the quarters have differed for each company. While Apple had the massive launch of the iPhone 3G to promote, RIM, on the other hand, effectively had no major launches in its quarter – the BlackBerry Bold has trickled out across a few markets, but is still not available in the US. Given its lack of new launches, a 6.1 million sales figure looks pretty credible.

That's not to say that Apple isn't outselling RIM, or that the iPhone isn't a big success. They probably are, and it is. But judging the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two companies and their products on the basis of a single quarter's results is impossible.

We'll get a far better picture of how Apple is doing in its rivalry with RIM over the next two quarters, as the BlackBerry Bold is launched into more markets, and the BlackBerry Storm makes its debut. Whether Apple overtaking RIM is a one-off or a sign of a real change in the market remains to be seen.

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