What's a good mark of success in the mobile phone world? One million sold? Two million? How about eight million? That seems like a pretty reasonable number.

That's the number that The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board (AFB) and Investor Village's AAPL Sanity board have come up with by tracking the iPhone 3G's IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) number and adding it to the 2.4 million first-gen iPhones that Apple sold this year. The total number in the latter category is 5,649,000 units--manufactured, not sold, which is to say that at least eight million iPhones have been manufactured this year.

Apple announced earlier that it hoped to sell 10 million phones by the end of the year. According to CNN, the company is likely to have manufactured that number, at least, by the end of September.