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While we won't the official number until Apple announces, it and AT&T may have sold 500,000 iPhones this weekend, according to both Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster and marketing consulting firm Blackfriars Communications. That astounding number (if accurate) for a smartphone, let alone a device that costs as much as the iPhone does, was no doubt helped along by the unheard of amount of buzz, hype and coverage the iPhone received leading up to its launch at 6:00 p.m. last Friday.

Update: Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey believes Apple may have sold 700,000 iPhone units over weekend. That's twice the 350,000 he projected before the launch.

It also appears Apple's decision to separate the purchase experience from service activation got people in and out of its and AT&T's stores at a brisk pace over the weekend, contributing greatly to the iPhone's initial success. Blackfriars says it clocked people with iPhones walking out of Apple stores at the rate of one to three per minute; or, to put it another way, 50 to 200 iPhones leaving each of Apple's 162 stores per hour.

You see, usually when you buy a cell phone or smartphone, the carrier sets up service for your mobile handset in-store. With so many people lining up, some days ahead of time, for the iPhone this system wouldn't have been practical; a bottleneck of those awaiting activation would have quickly developed, causing frustration and delays.

Piper Jaffray surveyed iPhone buyers in Minneapolis, New York and San Francisco, finding that 95 percent of them went with the more expensive 8GB model. It doesn't surprise us that the 8GB would be the runaway winner, as most folks likely figured an extra hundred bucks ($599 to the 4GB's $499) was worth forking over for twice as much storage; especially since you can't increase the iPhone's memory capacity due to the lack of a memory card expansion slot.

While Apple and AT&T's automated service activation system for the iPhone sped people out of stores quickly, and appears to have worked as intended for most customers, an unknown - but small - percentage of last weekend's estimated 500,000 iPhone customers ran into trouble—with some said to still be awaiting activation. The majority of the problems appear to be with existing AT&T customers, making the change over to the iPhone, rather than new AT&T subscribers.