According to Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies, the new Apple iPhone 3G is literally the iPhone’s “Second Coming” with the original iPhone being dubbed the “Jesus Phone.”

Anyway, Bajarin reckons, “The new iPhone is significant. It is part of an Apple eco-system of hardware, software and applications and their combination of those three make this the most unique cell phone/smart phone that we have on the market.”

Gene Munster at Piper Jaffray, and probably one of the biggest Apple bulls on the street anticipates 12 million iPhones will sell in 2008, however thanks to the iPhone 3G sales should jump to 45 million next year.

Bajarin says in his post, Munster expects in the first weekend of iPhone 3G sales 425,000 handsets sold worldwide for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. For the first two days Piper reckons 380,000 handsets sold compared to the original iPhone first two days sales of 270,000.

Piper also anticipates figures of 225,000 handsets sold in the USA, 75,000 to the UK, and roughly 7,000 across the other 18 countries. While for the September quarter Piper expects 4.1 million iPhone handsets sold.

Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research told Bajarin: “This may be far more important than last year’s launch because the iPhone is now moving from a single device to a software platform with lots of developers behind it. This is as important a computing platform for Apple in the future as the Mac (operating system) was back in 1984, except arguably it might be more important.”

Source — cnbc