GLG News by Mobile Phone Handsets Purchasers

Sprint Nextel’s 2nd quarter loss of 776,000 postpaid subs questions Best Buy’s record sales of the Samsung Instinct from Sprint while Radio Shack reports disappointment with Sprint compared to AT&T.

AT&T’s future results might be impacted by comments in the 2Q2008 presentation that the iPhone subsidy could reach $720 million and that 13 million or 18% of total subscribers had 3G devices.

The AT&T and Verizon 2nd quarter results point to five problem areas: 1) High DSL disconnects; 2) Increasing wire-line losses; 3)Flat business revenues; 4) Wireless ARPU increases of only 1% to 2%; 5) Competition for high-value wireless subscribers.  The high DSL disconnects make AT&T and...

AT&T first terminating DirecTV and now Dish might not be intended to drop satellite-television from bundled marketing, but instead to adopt mutual-selling roles in the relationship.

Verizon Wireless’s announced agreement with Brightpoint to support handsets for indirect retail channels appears to be an attempt to separate company-owned direct distribution.

Virgin Mobile USA’s acquisition of Helio is favorable for platform efficiencies, handset inventories and cash infusion, but the saturated teen market trends are questionable for retention and growth.

The strong initial sales of the $130 Samsung Instinct indicate that Sprint Nextel can thwart churn with handset upgrades and that there could be a price war of smartphones and unlimited data.

Different from healthcare dictation and call center IVRs, Nuance faces the challenge of the fragmented mobile market of device manufacturers, mobile carriers and application developers.

The AT&T CEO’s keynote at the NXTcomm2008 reminiscing about railroads and telephones could imply that AT&T is not going to be an agile, speedy player for multimedia communications.

Apple adding 12 Latin American countries to the Telefonica agreement after contracting America Movil will test the carrier influence on device pricing, distribution channels and network quality.