This is phone manufacturers selling 1.5 million phones - does that mean actual activations or does that mean it includes inventory sitting in stores. It sounds like the latter to me.
I'd ballpark it at 1 per 5000 people (that's what it seems like in my city) - so that's 60 000 in North America (or 25 phones a store). It seems like a lot of that could be stock (or all of it, 25/store doesn't seem like a lot of stock).
[refinement of numbers much appreciated]