The white iPhone 4 can re­al­ly, tru­ly, fi­nal­ly be yours. The phone went on sale on Thurs­day 29th April, 2011. A full 309 days af­ter it was sup­posed to be launched, Ap­ple said it has dis­cov­ered the se­cret sauce to man­u­fac­tur­ing its smart­phone in a white cas­ing, and it is ready to put the de­vice on sale.

"The white iPhone 4 has fi­nal­ly ar­rived and it's beau­ti­ful," Phil Schiller, Ap­ple's chief mar­ket­ing of­fi­cer, said in a pre­pared state­ment. "We ap­pre­ci­ate every­one who has wait­ed pa­tient­ly while we've worked to get every de­tail right." Ap­ple si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly dropped an­oth­er ma­jor piece of iPhone news: Its ex­pla­na­tion of the lo­ca­tion-track­ing da­ta file re­searchers dis­cov­ered and pub­li­cized last two weeks. Ap­ple re­leased a Q&A on the is­sue, call­ing it an un­in­ten­tion­al glitch.

"The rea­son the iPhone stores so much da­ta is a bug we un­cov­ered and plan to fix short­ly," Ap­ple said.

The myth­ic white phone: The black iPhone 4 went on sale June 24, 2010, but the white ver­sion was un­avail­able at launch. Ap­ple re­leased a press state­ment that day, say­ing the white mod­els have "proven more chal­leng­ing to man­u­fac­ture than ex­pect­ed, and as a re­sult they will not be avail­able un­til the sec­ond half of Ju­ly." A month lat­er, Ap­ple said it was still work­ing out the bugs in the man­u­fac­tur­ing process, and de­vices wouldn't be avail­able un­til "lat­er" in 2010. Then, in Oc­to­ber 2010, the white iPhone fi­nal­ly be­came avail­able for pre­sale on­line -- for ex­act­ly one day. Then Ap­ple re­treat­ed and pushed the date back to the spring.

Even­tu­al­ly, Ap­ple just took the white iPhone off its web­site en­tire­ly. It fi­nal­ly reap­peared two Wednes­days ago with an of­fi­cial state­ment from Ap­ple that it is ready to go on sale. Ap­ple nev­er stat­ed ex­act­ly what trou­bled the white iPhone 4. The iPhone 3GS was avail­able in white, as is the iPad 2. Ru­mours have cir­cu­lat­ed that Ap­ple had trou­ble get­ting the white pig­ment just right, that light on the white iPhone 4 was leak­ing through its glass back, or that light leak­age was in­ter­fer­ing with its abil­i­ty to take ac­cu­rate pho­tographs.

Even though the iPhone 4 has been on the mar­ket for near­ly a year and about 57 mil­lion black iPhone 4 de­vices have been sold, some an­a­lysts say the white ver­sion will be a boon to sales of the icon­ic de­vice.

"The de­layed launch of a white iPhone has cre­at­ed a cer­tain mys­tique around the prod­uct," said Bri­an White, an­a­lyst at Ticon­dero­ga Se­cu­ri­ties. "We ex­pect in­cre­men­tal iPhone 4 pur­chas­es due to this launch, dri­ven by re­place­ments, up­grades and/or new iPhone 4 pur­chas­es."

David Gold­man

http://mon­ey.cnn.com