Apple announced on Monday that it sold one million iPhone 3Gs since Friday, the day the highly anticipated device debuted in retail stores.

But on Tuesday Eric Zeman at InformationWeek fact-checked Apple. In his Over the Air mobile blog, Zeman gets right to the point:

That nice, shiny press release that Apple issued yesterday failed to point out one important fact. Apple counts "sales" as any device it has sold to wireless network operators such as AT&T. The network operators then re-sell the devices to actual end users. According to analysts, only 425,000 end users bought iPhones over the weekend.

It's actually one analyst, Gene Munster of Piper Jaffrey, who did some napkin number-crunching based on total stores, hours open and average number of phones activated at each store to arrive at that 425,000 figure. As this Fortune article points out, Munster issued a revised report to clients late Monday saying customer sales may have accelerated as the weekend went on.

I have no idea when we'll get solid numbers on iPhone first-weekend sales. But I'm more curious to see if, over time, the media adopts Apple's narrative -- namely, "iPhone 3G launch a huge success." I'm fairly confident that the Apple Spin Machine already has done its job.