Harry Potter stories overtake iPhone stories while AT&T reports lower iPhone activactions than expected

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While iPhone stories rose today to 18,728, Harry Potter stories outpaced them, rising to 22,164 in the last 24 hours. It just shows the anticipation of a great book generates its own buzz -- and that it doesn't happen overnight, given the lower counts over the weekend.

The big news this morning is that AT&T reported earnings today and also provided some insight into the first day and a half of iPhone sales. According to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) AT&T reported that it activated 146,000 iPhones by June 30, with 40% of those activations going to new AT&T customers. That's a bit lower than we expected -- we predicted 500,000 for the entire first weekend, and this rate would indicate a first weekend amount of about half that. However, Apple undoubtedly sold more iPhones than AT&T activated (especially given that people had to take them home and hook them to computers to activate them), and AT&T's activation systems were overloaded the first weekend. We'll get a better handle on iPhone sales tomorrow afternoon when Apple reports earnings.

Meanwhile, iPhone availability at Apple Stores remains excellent, although slightly lower than yesterday. 161 stores have iPhones in stock. Stores in Alabama, Illinois, Iowa and Missouri reported out of iPhones since yesterday, while the North Shore store here in MA got new stocks overnight. Only 7 stores nationwide are out of stock today.

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