Though not an anomaly by any means, it is fairly unusual for Apple to miss a hard launch date that it has so publicly set. So there’s clearly a good reason for the delay. The most obvious: Apple won’t launch the service until it’s got it right and it hasn’t quite got it there yet.

The company did not respond to requests for comment or an updated ETA.

According to Blair, Apple’s fifth-generation iPhone will be an incremental update to the current iPhone 4, not a major redesign. It will feature a faster A5 processor, a higher-resolution eight megapixel camera and possibly a larger screen. But beyond this, its design will be largely similar to that of the iPhone 4.

Says Blair, “We don’t expect a second, dramatically different iPhone to accompany this as we don’t think Apple needs to have 3 models in the market to address the high end, mid-tier and low end since the iPhone 4 (with memory lowered to 8 GB) will drop to $99 and effectively attack those markets.”

That’s an argument that does make a lot of sense. Supply chain chatter has suggested Apple’s prepaid iPhone, the so-called “iPhone 4S,” would be identical to the iPhone 4, with some minor cosmetic changes, a better camera, and faster processor. Which means it would likely cost more to build.

“Why would Apple bump up only the processor specs of the iPhone 4 in addition to a newly designed iPhone 5 if the goal is to sell it into the pre-paid market at a lower cost,” Blair asks. “A 4S would simply cost more and a 4S itself wouldn’t create a mid-tier market unless it was priced at $99 and the iPhone 4 went to $49 with the new iPhone at $199. We see this scenario as unlikely.”

Agreed.

Evidently the market is not buying into that logic. Because according to Stern Agee analyst Shaw Wu, iPhone 4 sales remain surprisingly strong, despite the device’s advanced age and a widely anticipated October refresh.

“The biggest surprise we are picking up is unexpected strength in Apple’s iPhone business,” Wu said in a note to clients. “The reason why this is remarkable is demand for iPhone 4 remains fairly robust despite it being well known that there will be an upcoming iPhone 5 refresh. We had modeled a sizeable quarter-to-quarter decline to reflect a pause and inventory drawdown ahead of a refresh and we now think this is conservative.”

Accordingly, Wu has revised his iPhone estimate for Apple’s last fiscal quarter of the year, raising it to 18.5 million from 15.7 million. That’s less than the 20.34 million iPhones the company sold in its third quarter, but it’s impressive just the same.

And Wu is not alone in noting strong continuing demand for the iPhone 4.

Last week, Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley noted that the device remains one of the top-selling smartphones in the U.S.

“Our checks indicated strong sales of the iPhone 4, as it remained the top selling smartphone at AT&T and Verizon despite increasing consumer expectations for the iPhone 5 launch,” he wrote. “During the holiday season, we anticipate strong sales of the iPhone 5, as we anticipate a strong global launch with increased distribution to new carriers including Sprint in the U.S. market.”

Astonishing demand for a smartphone that’s been on the market for a year now, but that’s perhaps to be expected. After all, the iPhone 3GS is two years old, and it’s still selling well at AT&T.

Maybe because it is a Friday in August, it’s natural that the Apple iPhone 5 rumors would get jacked up again.

Today, it was an erroneous report that Apple would hold a media event on Sept. 7, which was soon countered by another post by Jim Dalrymple of The Loop that said the company would not.

The second is the right one, because — as John Paczkowski has previously written — October is when Apple plans to launch its next-gen iPhone.

Several sources we have rechecked with today underscored that the later time frame — some had thought Apple would launch its latest products sometime in September, as they had done in previous years — was accurate.

There are always a myriad of rumors around the exact dates of basic events for Apple, a company which attracts an unusual amount of attention from consumers and the media, unlike any other tech company.

As we noted in our report, which many have also written about, “the iPhone 5 will use the faster A5 processor on which the iPad 2 runs, a Qualcomm dual mode GSM/CDMA baseband, and a higher resolution eight-megapixel rear camera.”

Apple will also unveil its iCloud offering to consumers then too, which it has already released to developers in beta.

So for now, we’d like everyone to go back to their beach chairs and chillax to the haunting work of one of Apple’s favorite bands — U2 — called, of course, “October”:

Speaking at the Oppenheimer Technology & Communications Conference today, Shammo said Verizon thought Apple would debut its next generation iPhone in early summer just as it has for the past few years.

“Obviously we’re disappointed that the iPhone 5 didn’t come out in June,” Shammo said, echoing comments made by Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam earlier this summer. “We continue to prepare for it and when that comes we’ll be ready.”

And more eager than ever to add it to its portfolio. Shammo said the device’s delayed debut has slowed its push into the smartphone market.

“Obviously this will slow our smartphone penetration down from where we thought it would be,” he said. “We [hoped we] would end the year around 50 percent, but that will probably delay that for a quarter to the first quarter of next year to hit that target.”

How far?

BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk, whose official estimate calls for Apple to sell 21.5 million in the fourth quarter of this year, argues it could end up selling 30 million (registration required) — 10 million of them in the U.S. alone.

“Since the iPhone 4 has been launched we estimate that AT&T and Verizon have represented 30 percent of Apple’s unit volume,” Piecyk wrote in a note to clients Wednesday. “If the US continues to represent 30 percent of Apple’s iPhone sales, it would imply a global iPhone demand for as many as 30 million iPhones in calendar Q4, which would generate as much as $5.3 billion and $1.19 of revenue and EPS upside to our estimates in that quarter. Sounds great but can Apple deliver that many phones?”

Piecyk concedes that 30 million may be a tough target to reach, but he doesn’t view it as impossible. Apple would have to do a few things to manage it, though, like adding Sprint as a third carrier partner in the states and continuing to sell a $49 legacy iPhone targeted at the market’s lower end.

“We estimate that when AT&T started selling the iPhone 4, it had over 16.5 million iPhone subscribers,” Piecyk explains. “This year we expect AT&T to enter the calendar fourth quarter with an installed iPhone subscriber base of 23.0 million, which provides much larger upgrade potential.” Given that, he believes it’s possible for the carrier to sell 5 million iPhones. Meanwhile, pent up demand for a brand new iPhone at Verizon could allow Big Red to sell another 4 million. So that’s 9 million right there. If Apple signs up Sprint as a third U.S. carrier, Piecyk figures it will sell another 1.5 million iPhones.

Grand total:10.5 million iPhones sold in the States. If Apple hits that number, and U.S. sales continue to be about 30 percent of global sales, then the fourth quarter is going to be a monster for the iPhone.

So those rumors claiming the iPhone 5 will debut in late September? They’re wrong.

Instead, it’s going to be an October surprise — the month in which Apple plans to launch its next-gen iPhone.

Sources with knowledge of the situation say reports claiming AT&T has blacked out employee vacations during the last two weeks of September in preparation for the retail debut of the next iPhone are misinformed.

“I don’t know why AT&T’s calling for all hands on deck those weeks, but it’s not for an iPhone launch,” a source familiar with Apple’s plans said.

So when can we expect the company to uncrate the iPhone 5?

“October,” the source said, while declining to offer a hard-launch date. Other sources said it will be later in the month, rather than earlier.

The source offered no details on the device’s design, but supply-chain chatter has previously indicated that the iPhone 5 will use the faster A5 processor on which the iPad 2 runs, a Qualcomm dual mode GSM/CDMA baseband, and a higher resolution eight-megapixel rear camera.

After Yahoo and Microsoft finally integrated their massive search technology and advertising partnership, comScore is reporting that Yahoo’s explicit core search share in the U.S. had declined in December.

Yahoo’s 16 percent share was down from 16.4 percent in November, which was actually down from 16.5 percent from October.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s aggressive Bing search service rose from 11.5 percent in October to 11.8 percent in November to 12 percent in December.

And big-guns Google more than regained a small loss from October (66.3 percent) to November (66.2 percent) in December, with a 66.6 percent share. (Yes, all you conspiracy theorists: 6, 6, 6.)

Yahoo’s decline in explicit core search–which comScore noted “excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results”–is, of course, a key metric to watch at the company, which needs to improve its revenue growth.

Here are some lovely tables to peruse:

The Journal pins the hardware street date for the week of November 8, but I’m told it will likely be earlier. Sources in a position to know say Windows Phone 7 smartphones will be in stores on October 21. They also say that Microsoft (MSFT) has lined up another exclusive carrier overseas: Orange.

That’s an impressive spike and one that continues a three-month streak of gains that began last November after a worrisome period of stagnation between September and October (click on chart and table below to enlarge).

Hard to believe that comScore’s measurements for January 2009 showed Twitter.com with an estimated six million visitors. With 67.5 million more just a year later, the site’s annual growth rate is a jaw-dropping 1,107 percent.

[Image Credits: comScore, Scarletbits]

At least, if you’re looking at the market for smartphone ads and “in-app” smartphone ads–as defined by AdMob, the smartphone ad company Google is buying for $750 million.

Also those caveats aside, compare these two charts from AdMob’s November and October reports, respectively. First, here are the October data measuring advertising activity on AdMob’s network, by operating system:

And here are the November data:

So Google (GOOG) is still trailing Apple (AAPL) by a wide margin, but it’s moving quickly–20 percent to 27 percent in a month is awfully fast. And bear in mind that the search giant was at a mere seven percent not too long ago.

If you want, you can raise an eyebrow about AdMob’s potential bias, given its new owner-to-be, but for a long time the big knock on AdMob’s data was that it was too Apple-centric. In any case, there appears to be something happening here. Let’s see what happens in the January report.

According to the latest NPD Group data, as reported by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, overall Mac sales in the U.S. were up 21 percent year over year in October and November. MacBook and MacBook Pro sales rose five percent during the period while desktop Mac sales increased 74 percent.

Impressive, to say the least. Certainly, these figures bode well for the quarter–assuming, of course, there’s little impact from those iMac shipping delays I wrote about earlier today. Said Munster: “While it remains early, it appears the new iMacs are driving Mac sales in the Dec. quarter and we are incrementally more confident in slight unit upside in the Dec. quarter.”

[Image credit: Flickr/nobihaya]

“As semiconductor sales are increasingly driven by the performance of the overall global economy, our sales are reflecting the improved economic conditions in our world markets,” said SIA President George Scalise. “Sales increased sequentially in all geographic regions.”

Chip makers have kept inventories lean, and the holiday ramp-up in production could be extended by a few weeks, Scalise added.

Great news, coming as it does after the chip industry’s seemingly endless procession of bad. The semiconductor sector is typically among the first industries to recover ahead of a broader market turnaround. This latest report suggests we may be at the beginning of just that or at least at an inflection point where the uncertainty in consumer and enterprise technology markets that’s been such a drag on the industry begins to abate.

ComScore (SCOR) says Hulu generated 856 million video views during the month, second only to Google’s (GOOG) YouTube in the U.S. This makes sense given that Hulu is driven in large part by broadcast TV, which starts running new shows in the fall.

And if Hulu didn’t post record numbers after adding ABC’s shows to the mix, there would be some real head-scratching. But it will be very interesting to see what happens to these numbers next year if Hulu does move ahead with some sort of pay service.

As always, note the huge disparity between YouTube and everyone else. And it’s also worth noting that while Hulu generates more views than any of its non-YouTube competitors, its reach isn’t quite as deep:

All of which is less relevant than the joint venture’s performance, which is still the subject of much debate. People familiar with Hulu tell me it is “close to break-even,” but I worry about putting much stock in words like “close” (or “break-even,” for that matter) without seeing numbers.

And in any case, that’s only half the issue for its owners these days; just as important are the performance of its parent companies and whether all the free stuff on Hulu is helping or hindering their networks and studios.

But more on that after the holiday. For now, here’s wishing you and yours a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.

Google (GOOG) claimed 65.4 percent of the domestic search market in October, up from 64.9 percent in September, according to comScore. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s (MSFT) share rose to 9.9 percent from 9.4 percent in September. A modest bit of growth for the month, but quite impressive year over year. Search volume was up 30.8 percent from October 2008.

And Yahoo (YHOO)? Well, the company’s search market share slipped to 18 percent in October from 18.8 percent in September. Below, a table showing comScore’s (SCOR) search volume and market share data, via JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan (click to enlarge):