Sprint (NYSE: S) is up five percent on heavy volume today with their
earnings announcement looking relatively positive. The company’s net loss of subscribers for the quarter was 75,000, which is an improvement. If you look into the details of the erosion of customer base, there’s a big number that jumps out at you. iDEN, the old Nextel customers, fell by 447,000.
Hesse is doing the right thing. iDEN was an aging technology with one feature, push-to-talk, when Sprint acquired Nextel. Either entice those Nextel customers to migrate to CDMA or give them a super-size option, 4G, and the new HTC smartphone launching this summer. We can live with short term negative net loss of subscribers. Just leave the iDEN network and the ghosts of the acquisition behind.
NYSE: S, May 2009-Present
The Wall Street Journal has an article today discussing an anticipated announcement by Sprint at CTIA next week. CTIA is the primary association for all things wireless. According to WSJ, Sprint will be announcing a new WiMax smartphone. The article is worth a quick read. With a little searching on the Web, you can even find some images of the device. There are two interesting things about this upcoming announcement.
The first is, if you have never experienced WiMax, you are not going to believe what you are in for. I got to see it in action as CTIA last Spring and was blown away by the speed. It has the potential to do for mobile devices what DSL and Cable Modems did for the home when we moved from dial-up.
Second, I think it is very interesting to note that they first phone that will be WiMax capable in the US will be and Android phone. I’m sure part of that is because HTC is the company who will build it, and they provide a lot of devices for cobranding in the wireless world. But just a couple of years ago HTC was churning out Windows Mobile Devices, and now they have a huge focus on Android as does much of the wireless market.
Regardless, we are all in for a game changer when WiMax and other 4G technologies arrive.
Well, it’s finally here. Palm launched the Pre last Saturday, and they are now finally in direct competition with Apple and the iPhone. So which one’s better? For me, I think the verdict is still out.
By now, unless you live under a rock somewhere, I’m sure you know how successful the iPhone has been. They have sold millions of devices in the two years the phone has been out, and users have downloaded over 1 billion applications in the year since the App Store was available. Apple also broke a lot of long standing rules in the cellular industry by having the phone activated through iTunes instead of directly with AT&T, and also by funneling users through iTunes for content instead of through AT&T. The iPhone was also ground breaking in that it introduced the concept of using gestures via a touch screen to interact with the device. What they have accomplished is truly amazing.
Don’t count out Palm just yet. Palm has traditionally been very strong with “prosumers”. This is a term they coined to talk about their sweet spot in terms of users. The demographic Palm originally catered to with the Treo was professional people who purchased their own devices and used it both for work and personal purposes. Add to that the fact that they pioneered the whole smartphone segment 5 years ago, and you have a pretty accomplished competitor for Apple. The new Pre has a slick little physical keyboard, a very nice touch screen, and a gesture base user interface. Sprint says the Pre broke all of their sales records for new devices. Sounds kind of like the iPhone, doesn’t it?
I think the real battle is still to come. WebOS has some very interesting capabilities with it’s application platform. It allows applications to integrate with the web, on device information, and across applications. Of course there aren’t many applications on the device yet. It will be interesting to see what developers come up with on the Pre. Part of what has made the iPhone successful is the slew of applications that have been introduced by developers outside of Apple. I’ll be curious to see how many, and what types of applications get introduced for the Pre.
