Apple got a good start out of the gates in 2010. The company announced its earnings yesterday for the first quarter of 2010.

Apple reported revenue for the quarter of $15.68 billion. That’s 82 percent over the prior December quarter’s results and surpasses the company’s previous quarterly record by almost $3.5 billion.

Net income was $3.38 billion, up 50 percent over the year-ago quarter and just shy of $850 million higher than the previous record. Earnings per share were $3.67.

Peter Oppenhemier, CFO and senior vice president, said Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones during the quarter, also a new company record, which marked an increase of 100 percent over the prior December quarter, according to a transcript of the earnings call from Seeking Alpha. Revenue from iPhone handset sales, accessory sales and carrier payments was $5.58 billion during the quarter compared with $2.94 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Part of the impressive growth in iPhone sales was attributed to the adding of 17 new carrier partners during the quarter, including Canada Bell and Telus, Orange in the U.K., China Unicom and KCF in South Korea. The iPhone is now sold in 86 countries.

Tim Cook, Apple’s COO, broke from form and actually disclosed iPhone sales in China. The company normally doesn’t disclose units by country. Cook said that more than 200,000 units were sold in China in the first quarter.

Oppenheimer took the opportunity to boast the iPhone’s growth in the enterprise space.

“We have continued to see a rapidly growing number of enterprise CIOs who have added iPhones to their approved device list. Specifically, we now have over 70 percent of the Fortune 200 deploying or piloting iPhone. This penetration has doubled since the iPhone 3GS first shipped this past summer,” he said, according to Seeking Alpha.

When asked whether a recent rash of bad press surrounding AT&T’s network performance had impacted Apple’s bottom line, Cook defended its exclusive carrier partner. “As you know, AT&T has acknowledged they are having some issues in a few cities and they have very detailed plans to address these. We have personally reviewed these plans and we have very high confidence they will make significant progress towards fixing them,” Cook said.

The company’s line of iPods continued to see strong sales, particularly the iPod Touch. Apple said it sold almost 21 million iPods compared with 22.7 million in the year-ago quarter. As expected, sales of traditional iPods declined year-over-year but the very strong 55 percent year-over-year growth in sales of iPod Touch resulted in an overall iPod ASP increase of 9 percent and revenue growth of 1 percent. Apple says it now controls 70 percent of the U.S. market for MP3 players.

The stellar earnings came just two days prior to one of the most hyped Apple events since the unveiling of the iPhone. Apple will hold an event in San Francisco tomorrow, where it is widely believed the company will unveil a new tablet device.

The usually tight-lipped Apple executives actually acknowledged a new product in the Q&A after the call. Both Oppenheimer and Cook expressed their enthusiasm for the product at different points during the call. Apple rarely acknowledges new products before release.

Apple stock was up 1.7 percent to $204 per share in early morning trading.