Yankee Group's Carl Howe writes over at the YGBlog that Apple sold about 4 times more phones than it did last year at this time, but the 3G iPhone was still probably the largest consumer electronics launch in history.

Howe notes that "the original 2007 iPhone launch was the largest first weekend consumer electronics launch in history as measured in inflation-adjusted dollars, garnering somewhere around $150 million in its first weekend on sale. That eclipsed the Microsoft XBox 360 ($128 million in the first weekend), Microsoft Windows 95 ($122 million in the first four days), and the Sony Betamax (not even close at $58 million in the first 7 months). But Apple just broke its own record. Assuming an average price after carrier subsidy of $433 (2/3 8 GByte models, 1/3 16 GByte models), Apple just posted approximately $433 million in first weekend iPhone sales."

So maybe it wasn't a smooth launch, but it didn't seem to hurt sales much.

On the carrier side of the mobile internet, the newscycle is still enamored with the idea of Sprint Nextel as an acquisition target. When SK Telecom and Earthlink sold Helio to Virgin Mobile USA a few weeks ago, the Korean telco suddenly lost its U.S. footprint: It only owned a stake in the new Virgin Mobile USA. It's not surprising then that SK Telecom is the object of the rumor mill's affection these days--especially as a potential suitor for Sprint Nextel. Helio made use of Sprint's network as does Virgin Mobile USA. Add in another report that SK and Sprint have held talks about working together on networking technologies and you have a juicy speculative piece that is worthy of all the major blogs and a few of the more daring newspapers.

Poll: Last week we asked our readers whether they would buy a 3G iPhone--the majority, 70 percent, said "Yes" and I'm tempted to join them. This week we want to know what you think SK Telecom and Sprint Nextel are up to: Is SK Telecom serious about buying Sprint? Are the two carriers simply collaborating on a technology, as some reports phrased it? Or are these reports just bunch of hot air?

Most smartphone makers know that the hot buttons in the mobile internet are location-based services and social networking, and if you put GPS in the handset and mix the two features together, this drives significant increases in mobile web usage. Even greater uptake - and greater differentiation from PC-based services - could be stimulated by going hyper-local, and there will be a race between the big names like Facebook, and the mobile specialists, to get there first.

Loopt and Whrrl were early in integrating their services with GPS so that users can locate their friends accurately and create hyper-local interactions with friends (or strangers when ad hoc connections are enabled) currently in the neighbourhood. These services then integrate with other location-based features like finding restaurants or bars, and social networkers can do microblogging with small local groups, and hyper-local reviews, all based around GPS.

Now Facebook and MySpace will soon follow suit. The new Apple versions integrate with any iPhone's camera, allowing for direct upload of pictures to user profiles, and Facebook has incorporated chat too, and the two majors are expected to tie their services to GPS functionality on the iPhone as early as September. At that point, the advantage of the mobile specific apps could disappear. Perhaps their greatest hope lies with the mobile operators. Keen to control the social networking phenomenon rather than just provide the bitpipe for it, some cellcos are putting the application at the heart of their mobile web offerings. Particularly prominent in this is T-Mobile, which has made social networking the lead app in its web 'n' walk portal and tariffs, and is introducing a service that allows users to keep track of all their social networking sites and profiles from a single dashboard. That could be the best survival route for the mobile specialists - unless, like some start-ups like ZYB, which sold to Vodafone, they can get a lucrative acquisition by an operator, portal or handset maker.

So it's more than reasonable to state that a hyper-local social networking boon could be on the horizon if Facebook, MySpace, or even Twitter, find a way to tie their services or their third-party applications into the GPS functionality of the iPhone 3G.

Here's why:

Most people and their friends already use these services. There's no new software to download, no evangelizing new tools to friends. It's a natural and automatic extension of, for one example, Facebook Mobile's status update.

The built-in status or feed options lend themselves well to automatic location sharing, whether it is an intersection or a restaurant, shop, salon, etc.

These status updates could easily connect to user-written reviews or even feed conversations about specific locations. (Note: Loopt already integrates with Yelp, but one still needs to install Loopt to benefit.)

These status updates could also be customized to either update all friends or to update only friends who are within a certain radius.

Finally, all but Twitter currently have integrated social ads. According to Ostrow, partnering with a hyper-local advertising service such as AppLoop would create an improved mobile monetization model for the social networks, as well.

"I would think that's the direction they would want to go into. It's a niche as a service but could be very big as a feature of existing social networks," Ostrow said.

Some might say that since other phones, such as the BlackBerry, have had 3G features for some time and both Loopt and Whrrl have existing applications for these, this hyper-local social networking explosion would've already happened. Again, the numbers don't lie. In March, M:Metrics (now comScore.com) reported that the iPhone is the most popular device for accessing news and information on the mobile Web. From the report: Usage of social networking is also popular among iPhone users: 49.7 percent accessed a social networking site in January, nearly twelve times the market average. Twenty percent of iPhone owners accessed Facebook, one of the first Web properties to customize its content for the iPhone, versus 1.5 percent of the total mobile market.

"The iPhone demographic is definitely better suited to these types of features," Ostrow said. "The more progressive Apple fans tend to be a lot of the heavy social networkers and they are probably more likely to use this stuff."

The reality of this could be a bit daunting to the firms who have invested significant dollars into the niche location-based social networking players, though it could also represent opportunity. It's possible that we'll see Facebook, MySpace, Twitter -- and maybe even FriendFeed -- step into this game and acquire the likes of Loopt and Whrrl and create a bit of much-needed social networking consolidation.