Remarking on Apple’s (AAPL) December quarter in a note to investors this morning, Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Doug Reid said iPhone and iMac sales for the period have been quite strong. “Our checks suggest December quarter sales of iPhones are tracking ahead of our prior estimates, driven by increased market penetration in the United States, additional carrier agreements in multiple countries, and first-time launches in Korea and China,” Reid wrote.

“Mid-December Apple Store and carrier checks indicate that the 2009 holiday shopping season has seen a sharp increase in the purchase of iPhone as a gift option,” the analyst continued. “We also estimate better than expected iMac sales in the quarter following a successful product refresh (announced on October 20). Our checks indicate strong demand throughout the holiday season for the new iMac line.”

Seems that the shipping delays associated with Apple’s new 27-inch iMacs haven’t undermined sales nearly as much as some feared. Reid says that demand and in-store availability of both 21.5-inch and 27-inch models remains strong, so much so that he’s raising his iMac unit estimate for the December quarter from 655 thousand to 721 thousand.

Demand for the iPhone has also been strong thanks to the end of carrier-exclusivity agreements in some markets.

“The ability to add iPhones to existing family service plans with carriers has been a key driver in C4Q09, our checks indicate. In addition, industry checks also suggest that AAPL is benefiting from the addition of second or third carriers in markets (e.g. UK, Canada) and from a strong initial sales ramp in Korea.”

How much of a benefit? A sizable one. Reid figures Apple will sell 8.21 million to 8.89 million iPhones during the December quarter. And he expects the company to sell 31.59 million to 32.27 million in fiscal 2010.

Five dollars and a ratty “Think Different” T-shirt says Apple shares will hit another new 52-week high today.

What we’re seeing is just a seasonal sell-off that’s occurring a bit earlier than usual. Apple’s stock typically outperforms during the last four months of the year and underperforms in the first four months of the year that follows (see tables below; click to enlarge). With Apple (AAPL) a no-show at Macworld this year, that timeline has been accelerated a bit.

“We believe investors are leveraging the late ’09 outperformance and getting ahead of the early ’10 sell-off this year, which may be causing the recent share weakness,” Munster explains. “We note that in the past shares have gone up in anticipation of the Macworld conference; however, this is the first year Apple will not participate in the tradeshow….We remain confident that the Dec. quarter will provide enough upside, driven by Mac, to give investors confidence that the fundamentals are intact.”

That seems a reasonable assessment, particularly given Apple’s reportedly quite strong Black Friday sales. As Thomas Weisel Partners noted a few weeks back, the company’s stores experienced “robust sales driven by sustained brand strength, rising demand for app-ready iPod touches and a positive-mix in Macs.” Presumably, that will continue through the holidays.

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Thomas Weisel Partners visited 41 Apple (AAPL) retail locations in the United States, Canada and the U.K. over the weekend and was impressed by what it saw: “robust sales driven by sustained brand strength, rising demand for app-ready iPod touches and a positive-mix in Macs driven by Black Friday discounting.”

The research house says its checks suggest that same-store sales are up slightly year-over-year, driven by unflagging demand for the iPhone, among other things.

“While competition continues to intensify as new Android devices ramp our early holiday season analysis suggests upside exists to our Dec. quarter iPhone unit estimate of 8.2 million driven by growth in the broader smartphone market and overall market share gains by iPhone,” analyst Doug Reid explained in a note to clients.

“Although we see evidence of a strong early ramp by products which compete against iPhone, notably Droid on Verizon in the United States,” Reid added, “our checks indicate sales of iPhone remain strong in Europe and are accelerating off a low base in Asia.”

And what of Mac sales? With just one month of data, it’s a bit too early to make a call on the quarter–especially when nearly 50 percent of Mac sales in this quarter typically occur in the month of December. That said, Thomas Weisel expects Mac sales to be quite strong on increased demand for notebooks–specifically the MacBook Pro.

“Following checks we estimate that at 21 of the 41 stores (51%) MacBook Pro (led by the lower end 13” model) out-sold the recently introduced $999 MacBook. We had expected the lower ASP MacBook to outsell the Pro by 70% to 30%,” Reid wrote.

“The strength in Pro sales is consistent with Apple’s unexpected move to discount the MacBook Pro line but not the MacBook (resulting in a selling price for the 13″ MacBook Pro of $1098 in the United States, only $99 more than the $999 MacBook). We believe that Apple continues to benefit from the strong consumer PC demand that we saw in the Sep quarter.”

• A delayed EC review process of the current proposed acquisition, which may end in a rejection left unchallenged by Oracle
• A renegotiated deal with Oracle, which would likely exclude MySQL and therefore involve a renegotiated deal price
• An offer by IBM (IBM) to buy Sun at a discount to the Oracle offer following a rejection by the EC of the current Oracle deal
• A scrapping of the deal by Oracle

Interestingly, Reid feels this last possibility isn’t as disastrous as it might sound. Sun has $1.8 billion in cash, and while its latest results weren’t at all pretty, they did feature improving gross margins.

“Our current thesis on [Sun] assumes the announced [Oracle] acquisition will close, but risks have increased,” Reid wrote. “There remains a risk that the European Commission will provide a ‘statement of objections’ to [Oracle’s] planned acquisition of [Sun] based on concerns regarding [Oracle’s] plans for the MySQL database which [Sun] currently owns. The deadline for such a decision is January 19, 2010 but it is possible that the EC will state objections before the end of the year.”

Elaborating, Reid notes that “Although [Oracle] could likely reduce the risk of a statement of objection–and thus of a delayed or perhaps failed bid for [Sun]–by supplying to the EC an argument to explain why the [Oracle-Sun] deal will not adversely impact competition in the database market, our assumptions around [Sun’s] valuation include increased risk regarding the completion of the [Oracle-Sun] transaction at $9.50….While we believe the currently proposed acquisition by [Oracle] is the most likely outcome for [Sun], we believe other scenarios remain possible, although each is made more difficult by the continued uncertainty around Sun’s fate, and the resulting erosion in customer confidence in Sun.”

Sounding off in a barrage of research notes today, analysts suggested Palm investors view the transition in leadership as a positive. “The timing was certainly awkward, coming just four days after the launch of the Pre,” Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Matthew Sheerin said in a note to investors. “Our take is that Rubinstein was being groomed for the last two years to run the company, and is ready for the next challenge, having put together a solid engineering team.”

James Faucette of Pacific Crest agreed. “Our turnaround thesis on Palm has always been rooted in the development team that Palm had recently put together, particularly the addition of Jon Rubinstein as head of development,” he said. “Today’s announcement effectively ensures that one of Silicon Valley’s best talents not only remains with Palm, but is fully engaged with the company’s future.”

And Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry said the streamlining of senior management roles at Palm was an absolute necessity. “I think this is the right move, a smart move,” he told the Mercury News. “[Rubinstein’s] involvement in the company has to be more mainstream. He has to be responsible for the success, and accountable for the failure, if there is any.”

Palm shares were up nearly eight percent, to $12.94 at the time of this writing. That’s up more than 500 percent since last December.

Yesterday, the company noted in a press release that one of its largest customers, London-listed Solar Integrated Technologies has discontinued discussions with a commercial lender on a new line of credit, and extended its current loan agreement with a unit of General Electric (GE) until July 3. Solar Integrated itself had announced that news a day earlier, also noting that it has hired Thomas Weisel Partners to consider strategic alternatives for the company, including a possible sale or financing.

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After all, the company has tried but generally failed to extend its approach to selling advertising into offline media sectors like television and radio. Nonetheless, as Thomas Weisel Partners analyst Christa Quarles notes this afternoon in the latest edition of her Internet Quarterly report, Google is already the largest media company in the world as measured by ad dollars, with about three percent of the total market. She suggests comparing that to Wal-Mart (WMT), with about four percent of the global retail market.

Quarles notes that the company intends to extend its advertising reach into the mobile, display and video sectors “by improving relevancy and efficiency.” But the more lucrative opportunity might lie elsewhere, with corporate IT budgets.

Quarles notes that Google has barely put a dent into global IT spending, with only about a 0.1 percent share of what was a nearly $400 billion market in 2008; she sees this as “a large and untapped market for Google.”

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For the May 2009 fiscal year, Klasell cuts his EPS estimate to $1.38, from $1.41. For FY 2010, he goes to $1.51, from $1.58. Klasell’s new price target is $20, down from $24. Klasell maintains an Overweight rating on the stock.

“Our checks indicate that deals continue to be signed, but many deals are subject to downsizing and [there are] some reports of greater-than-normal discounting,” he writes in a research note.

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Mehdi Hosseini, Friedman Billings: Hoseini repeated his Market Perform rating on the stock, but cut estimates; he slashes his 2009 view to $2.06 a share, from $3.02. For 2010, he goes to $3.05, from $3.40. Hosseini says the cuts reflect his view that 2009 will bring slower-than-expected demand in both Italy and the U.S. He also thinks ASPs will come under pressure, offsetting the impact of cost-cutting and pressuring gross margin. He also sees further trouble ahead in Spain, noting that some systems and modules have actually been shipped out of Spain and into other geographies. He notes that Spain accounted for 40 to 50 percent of SunPower’s 2008 revenues.

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Actually, it seems quite systematic. “It’s part of the global cost-cutting move,” one Oracle (ORCL) employee tells The Times of India, which notes that 40 workers were just let go at the company’s Bangalore offices. “This is just the initial move and the numbers will definitely increase. By next week, we should get the actual figures.”

Now, word on the street has it that the figure in question here is somewhere around 8,000. But there’s no mention of Oracle in the latest EDD Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification list, which would seem to suggest that 8,000 figure is bogus. And according to our sources it is. We’re told that layoffs are occurring, but that their number is in the hundreds, not thousands.

“We believe demand has deteriorated across most of the company’s core end-markets, with a particularly sharp slowdown in handsets, evidenced by a number of key supplier and competitor pre-announcements,” Sheerin wrote in a note to clients. “[The economic downturn] will make a recovery in the core handset business even more challenging and could accelerate cash burn.”

More ugly news for Motorola (MOT), which last week had its credit rating slashed to Junk by Standard & Poor’s.

“We believe demand has deteriorated across most of the company’s core end-markets, with a particularly sharp slowdown in handsets, evidenced by a number of key supplier and competitor pre-announcements,” Sheerin wrote in a note to clients. “[The economic downturn] will make a recovery in the core handset business even more challenging and could accelerate cash burn.”

More ugly news for Motorola (MOT), which last week had its credit rating slashed to Junk by Standard & Poor’s.