How bad are things for fourth-place U.S. carrier T-Mobile? Apparently, so bad that they issue a press release to announce fourth-quarter operating results which mentions being “negatively impacted” by the release of the iPhone 4S on three other carriers, right in the first sentence.
T-Mobile USA parent Deutsche Telekom has announced their Q4 2011 financials, but the news isn’t all that fantastic for the nation’s fourth-place carrier. The failure of the AT&T marriage was certainly a blow, although ultimately T-Mo benefitted from the loss with a billion cash payment in December, plus additional spectrum and roaming for its customers.
The problem is one of diminishing returns, as T-Mo USA bled 526,000 customers in the fourth quarter after gaining 126,000 in the third quarter; the carrier only lost 23,000 in the same quarter a year ago.
“The sequential and year-on-year increase in customer losses is a result of intense competitive pressure from the launch of the iPhone 4S by three nationwide competitors in the fourth quarter of 2011,” the press release notes. “In addition, higher connected device deactivations contributed significantly to the net customer loss in the fourth quarter of 2011, including a nearly 265,000 deactivation related to one customer with a yearly service revenue impact of less than million.”
Revenue dropped from .69 billion a year ago to .57 billion, which doesn’t sound so bad considering the carrier is still serving 33.2 million customers. “However, not carrying the iPhone led to a significant increase in contract deactivations in the fourth quarter of 2011,” explained T-Mo USA president and CEO Philipp Humm. “In 2012 and 2013, T-Mobile USA will invest to get the business back to growth, including an incremental .4 billion investment in its network modernization initiative, which will total a billion investment over time.”
So how will T-Mobile USA get its mojo back? It’s all about LTE, which the carrier plans to start deploying in 2013 on the AWS spectrum it received as a bonus for the AT&T merger not going through as planned. “This anticipated network transformation will significantly enhance coverage and performance for customers,” the press release notes — assuming there are many left by the time it lights up.
Perhaps the real question is: Will the 2012 iPhone finally go pentaband (if not LTE) to allow for 3G/4G data on T-Mobile? If so, we can see a healthy market for unlocked iPhone 5 models later this year…
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
(Image courtesy of CellularPCS.com)
Wow, another week has come and gone, just like that! By this time next week, the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show will be winding down in Las Vegas and we’ll all be giddy about the new stuff to look forward to later this year (or alternately, seriously depressed that we can’t afford it). But before you get a full-on dose of CES fever all next week, it’s time to hunker down and ingest some of the tech news that’s making waves on this fine Friday, January 6, 2012.
It would seem that the Apple rumor mill is ready to go into repeats of last year’s successful season prematurely. According to DigiTimes — whose track record with these things is spotty at best — Apple will apparently ship the iPad 3 we all want in March, including “a full HD display,” while saving an even better model they’re calling the iPad 4 for October to compete with Microsoft’s Windows 8 launch, which will be offered on a wide variety of tablets. This is almost exactly what the rumor mill called up last year, with claims that the iPad 2 would be released last March and an HD iPad 3 later in the fall, so you’d do well to take this with a heaping grain of salt to be sure. According to Taiwanese component makers, the iPad 3 “will come with a QXGA (1,536×2,048 pixels) display and longer battery life,” although little is said about the rumored iPad 4. The one thing in the DigiTimes report that does make sense is that Apple will keep the iPad 2 around at a lower price point (9) when the iPad 3 is introduced, which makes total sense to us.
Americans are used to free mobile phones when they sign a two-year agreement, but a brand-new iPhone 4S is just crazy talk… right? According to BusinessWeek, not really — assuming, that is, that you live in an area of mainland China covered by China Unicom, the country’s second-largest carrier. Beginning January 13, China Unicom is offering a free 16GB iPhone 4S for customers who sign up for a two-year agreement which costs as little as 286 yuan () per month. High rollers can also opt for a 32GB model, but you’ll need to commit for three years instead. Any way you slice it, that’s a pretty amazing deal, especially considering China Unicom is the only one of the country’s three wireless carriers to offer the iPhone — so it’s not like they have to compete with anyone on price.
The Mac|Life crew loves them some Steam, so we were encouraged to hear word from online gaming company Valve today that we weren’t alone. According to their press release, 2011 was a banner year for the Steam platform on the Mac and PC, with more than 1,800 games served up to more than 40 million accounts. For the seventh straight year, units sales increased by more than 100 percent, and during the company’s year-end Holiday Sale, Steam had more than five million simultaneous users playing at once. So how much data does all of this activity amount to? Steam doubled the amount of data served between 2010 and 2011 for a whopping 780 petabytes of data tossed all over the world. Thankfully, the company also doubled its service capacity at the same time, making tweaks to improve user download rates at the same time. The company is now looking ahead to 2012, when it undoubtedly hopes to top last year’s boffo figures.
Apple has apparently had success with their “store within a store” concept at Best Buy, with AppleInsider now reporting that Cupertino may introduce the idea to “select Target locations later thus year, enabling the company to expand its retail reach into smaller metro areas.” According to the usual “source familiar with Apple’s plans,” the mini-stores would launch in 25 larger Target stores “in locations which can’t support a standalone Apple Store.” Needless to say, that’s a drop in the bucket considering Target has 1,752 stores across the United States, but Best Buy currently has 600 locations with so-called “Apple Shops” out of its 1,000 total stores, so the concept could expand quickly if successful.
A new report from Reuters is claiming that iPhone 4S data consumption is on average double that of the iPhone 4, with a study from “telecom network technology firm” Arieso pointing most of the blame in Siri’s direction. It’s no big stretch to assume that data use on a new smartphone is on the rise, with the research firm claiming that iPhone 4S users “transfer on average three times more data than users of the older iPhone 3G model.” That’s kind of a skewed metric if you ask us, since there were far less data-hungry apps when the iPhone 3G — and the shiny new App Store — were first introduced in July, 2008. But for whatever reason, Siri is taking the brunt of the study’s blame for sucking down bandwidth. “I use the iPhone 4 myself and when I first heard of the iPhone 4S features I was not compelled to rush out and get one. However, the data usage numbers I am seeing make me wonder what I am missing,” said Arieso’s chief technology officer, Michael Flanagan. Needless to say, the problem is only going to get worse as more and more smartphones are sold…
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
Technology moves faster than poop through a goose: New products crop up quickly, while established brands and well-loved hardware can disappear just as fast. The same goes for those that make new technology possible, with new entrepreneurs bringing their wares to the fore, and legends leaving us years before their time. This past year proved no exception. With the new year creeping ever closer, we submit to you ten of our picks for the most important tech stories of the year. Designed by Apple users for Apple users, we’re sure you’ll find yourself nodding in agreement at more than a few of our choices.
It’s the last Friday of the year, and that means the final installment of our daily news recap for 2011. It’s been a busy year for Apple: From Thunderbolt Macs to the iPad 2, OS X Lion to the iPhone 4S and of course, the death of co-founder Steve Jobs, many of us are apprehensive about the future of our favorite tech company heading into 2012. For now, let’s sit back and reflect on the year with a few final news tidbits for this Friday, December 20, 2011.
Are you a Dropbox user still in search of a better way to sync your files? If you have a Google account (or are willing to get one), there’s now another option. TechCrunch is reporting that Insync 2.0 is now available and best of all, it’s totally free to use. Billed as “Dropbox for Google users,” the service uses only a Gmail address to join up and the Mac client software adds the contents of your Google Docs account to a sidebar folder in the Finder; anything placed there is synced to Google’s cloud, where all users have 1GB by default. GDocs storage is much cheaper than Dropbox — for example, 0 per year with Dropbox gets you a mere 50GB, while the same dough lands you a whopping 400GB from Google. To sign up, jump over to the Insync website and within minutes you’ll be ready to go.
While the general consensus is that Nokia’s smartphone business is in the toilet, the numbers show a different reality. According to AllThingsD, recent metrics compiled by Pingdom show that the cell phone giant’s sagging Symbian OS actually holds 33.59 percent of the global mobile OS market — more than the sexier iOS with 22.56 percent and even more than Google’s Android freight train at only 21.74 percent. Even more bizarre, Symbian is actually grew in market share over 2011 after starting at 30.25 percent in January! So, next time you get into an argument with iOS or Android tech snobs over who dominates in the world market, just point ‘em back here and have their minds blown.
There’s no end in sight for the patent battles between Apple and Samsung, who has been aggressive in recent months in their efforts to mock iPhone users on U.S. television commercials. According to MacRumors, it’s a very different story in Samsung’s home turf of South Korea, where the company is openly copying the look and feel of Apple’s iPad commercials for their own Samsung Galaxy Tab. As shown in the embedded video below, “the ad depicts a father and daughter playing with a Galaxy Tab in a sequence of shots reminiscent of Apple’s own iPad ads.” MacRumors even posted a rough translation of the narration: “You try to have fun with me, you try to win against me, you ask me millions of questions, you sit on my lap, you want to stay beside me all the time, strangely, when I stay with you time passes very quickly. This is a precious time.” It’s not likely that Apple will be able to sic their legal team against this kind of thing, but it’s fairly shameless on Samsung’s part…
While Nokia’s Symbian OS is kicking ass and taking names worldwide (see above), the aging platform is sagging here in the U.S., and it’s not alone. comScore has just released a Mobile Subscriber Market Share report for November which clearly shows Google Android and Apple iOS chewing away at the market share formerly dominated by Research in Motion’s BlackBerry. RIM dipped from 7.1 percent to 6.5 percent between August and November, while Apple rose from 9.8 percent to 11.2 percent during the same period. Symbian dipped by a lesser amount (1.5 percent, down from 1.8 percent) and Microsoft is clearly failing to gain traction with Windows Phone after slipping half a percentage point from 5.7 percent to 5.2 percent. It’s a pretty rough market out there if you’re not producing Android or iOS devices, that’s for sure.
Right on the heels of the iOS 5.0.1 untethered jailbreak earlier this week comes news from FireCore, LLC that the same exploit has been introduced to its Seas0nPass Mac and Windows software for the second-generation Apple TV. Today’s update finally allows ATV owners to update to the latest 4.4.4 software (which is technically a variant of iOS 5.0.1) while remaining completely untethered — no more need to run Seas0nPass at each power up. The update supports all of the aTV Flash plugins with the exception of Plex, but those developers are hard at work on an update which will hopefully arrive in the near future.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
Curious to know what Apple thinks is the cream of the crop in its own iTunes Store? Well, wonder no more: Cupertino has just posted its 2011 entries for iTunes Rewind, which celebrates the best music, apps, TV shows, books, movies and podcasts for the entire year. How many of them did you purchase?
Apple is winding down a banner year for iTunes with its selections for best of the year. iTunes Rewind is an annual showcase of the year’s best music, movies, TV shows, apps, books and podcasts and the winners for 2011 are now posted.
Of particular interest is the App Store selections, with this year’s nod for iPhone App of the Year going to Instagram, billed as “the year’s definitive photo-sharing app.” Standing tall alongside it is Tiny Tower, the iPhone Game of the Year. (Interesting anecdote: Both are free apps, which certainly says something about our culture, doesn’t it?) Runners-up include VidRhythm, Tiny Wings, Band of the Day and Touchgrind BMX.
On the iPad front, another photo app gets the nod for iPad App of the Year: Snapsneed, billed as an “astonishing standout” for making “jaw-droppingly gorgeous photos.” Dead Space for iPad grabs the nod for iPad Game of the Year, with the runners-up including djay, Contre Jour HD, Jamie’s Recipies and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP.
Jumping over to books, surprisingly the Walter Isaacson-penned Steve Jobs official bio doesn’t rank for Best Nonfiction, even though it’s perched atop the iTunes best-seller list for that category. Podcast winners include The Jillian Michaels Show, NPR Programs: Fresh Air Podcast, Epic Meal Time and TEDTalks.
Now it’s your turn: How many of your favorites got the nod this year? Head over to Apple’s official iTunes Rewind 2011 link and find out.
Follow this article’s author, J.R. Bookwalter on Twitter
