FInancial Results

AT&T activates 4.3M iPhones, representing 78% of Q1 smartphone sales

Carrier AT&T announced quarterly earnings this morning, revealing they activated 4.3 million iPhones during the first quarter of this year, with 21 percent new to AT&T. The figure represents a substantial decrease over the 7.6 million iPhones the company activated during the holiday quarter of last year, when the iPhone 4S launched in the U.S.

On a more realistic annual basis, it's a healthy 19 percent growth. And with three out of four smartphones sold in the quarter being iPhones, the nation's second-largest wireless operator definitely remains the iPhone network no matter how you look at it.

Also notable, AT&T's quarterly iPhone activations easily beat the 3.2 million iPhones Verizon activated during the first quarter of 2012. Apple is scheduled to report its quarterly earnings today after the markets close, at 5pm Eastern / 2pm Pacific. The company will webcast the earnings call and we will be at hand to relay important tidbits as they happen...

Verizon activates 3.2M iPhones in Q1, unveils shared data plans mid-summer

Verizon Wireless, the nation's top carrier, announced quarterly earnings this morning, with finance chief Andrew Davies telling Wall Street analysts on a conference call that the company activated 3.2 million iPhones during the first quarter.

The figure accounts for more than half of the 6.3 million smartphones Verizon sold throughout the quarter, echoing a similar ratio in the previous quarter.

Verizon also sold 2.9 million LTE-enabled devices that now account for an impressive 9.1 percent of their wireless user base...

The Kindle Fire is gaining market share but the iPad remains the king

Some interesting news has been released today regarding the recent success of the Kindle Fire, Amazon's flagship tablet device. According to iSuppli, Amazon managed to grab a 14% share of the tablet market in the last financial quarter, while Apple's market share dropped from 64% in Q3 to 57% in Q4.

Apple released the iPad 2 nearly a year ago so it makes perfect sense that demand will drop as the year goes on, especially when new products like the Fire get released later in the year. I expect market share to significantly increase further in Apple's favor when iPad 3 drops...

Sprint Sold 1.8M iPhones Last Quarter

Sprint Nextel is expected to release its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2011 later today, and it appears that numbers are even worse than they were during the previous quarter.

For the three months that ended on December 31st, Sprint lost $1.3 billion on revenue of $8.7 billion. That compares to a loss of $929 million on revenue of $8.3 billion for the same quarter the previous year.

Everything isn't that bad for Sprint though. The company managed to sell 1.8 million iPhones, of which 40% were new customers..

80% of Smartphones Sold by AT&T Are iPhones

If you needed more proofs that the iPhone kicks ass, you may want to look at AT&T's financial results for last quarter. Even though the company had to swallow a big $4.2 billion pill for pulling out of the T-Mobile buyout, AT&T actually did pretty good.

I'll spare you the boring financial numbers, which you can access by clicking the link above, but we're just going to focus on what we really care about: iPhone sales numbers. And they are big...