After yesterdays announcement by Orange France (from iphone.fr) that they sold 70,000 iPhones in their first month of sales, which is in line with their predicted sales of 50-100K units by year's end.

It should be noted that this is still very good for Orange, which attracted no fewer than 48% new customers with the iPhone! And this is worth gold ...

This is a good indication that the rumors of Apple announcing selling over five million iPhones by the end of its first fiscal quarter at Macworld San Francisco. Actual numbers from the UK and Germany have not surfaced considering past reports and the fact that we just passed through the busiest buying quarter of the year, it seems pretty certain that Apple is on target to meet that five million unit prediction.

Another item gleaned from the French iPhone site; all the fears that there was a data cap on their unlimited data plan were unfounded. The contract states a data cap of 500 megabytes per month existed, but users have confirmed that exceeding that amount of data usage does not incur additional charges (thanks to epsilon, which has been monitoring this frequently on the forum iPhone.fr). As has been reported in earlier reports, here in the U.S., 60% of iPhone customers are using over 25 megabytes of data per month as opposed to only 1.8% for the other smartphone users. This indicates that we are using our laptops less and our iPhones more when we are on the move. These numbers only indicate usage using the EDGE network and not our WiFi access so later reports on iPhone Safari usage will better indicate how large a penetration the iPhone has made on mobile web surfing.

Let us know what you think over in the comments and forums.