Estimate: As Many as 100,000 iPhones Sold for Unlock

Amid all the controversy about those unlocked iPhones — and what Apple’s (AAPL) most recent software update did to them — it’s never been clear how many devices were actually affected. Based on the number of times their iUnlock software was downloaded, the iPhone Dev team put the number of unlocked iPhones, perhaps unrealistically, at several hundred thousand. Shaw Wu of American Technology Research insists the real figure is so small as to be “immaterial.”

Now we have the first estimate based on actual shoe-leather research and, not surprisingly, it falls between the two.