Mignon Clyburn said healthy competition is key to continued innovation.

“We have taken a light regulatory approach, but have touched when necessary,” Mignon said, speaking at the opening of the CTIA 2013 show in Las Vegas.

The most notable of those touches, of course, was the agency’s opposition to AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile USA. The agency has since approved other combinations, including Verizon’s partnership with the cable companies, and T-Mobile USA’s acquisition of MetroPCS.

Clyburn had some specific words of praise for smaller, regional carriers that she said provide excellent customer service and help connect rural America.

Speaking in her first week as acting chair, Clyburn said that an incentive spectrum auction remains on track, with rules to be issued this year and the bidding itself to take place next year.

“The agency is doing a lot of creative things to make more spectrum available,” said Clyburn, who will hold the post until confirmation of her successor, Tom Wheeler.

The move comes just ahead of a vote of Clearwire shareholders scheduled for later Tuesday — a vote that clearly wasn’t going to go Sprint’s way. Sprint, which already owns just more than half of Clearwire, needed the approval of the majority of Clearwire’s minority shareholders — some of which vocally opposed the deal.

With the new offer, Clearwire said it is adjourning the scheduled meeting without taking any action, and its board will review the new offer. The meeting is now set to resume May 30.

“Consistent with its fiduciary duties and in consultation with its financial and legal advisors, the Special Committee of the Clearwire Board of Directors will review this revised proposal from Sprint,” Clearwire said.

It’s unclear, though, whether the bump will be enough to satisfy shareholders such as Crest Financial, who have said they believe that Clearwire is worth significantly more than Sprint’s original $2.97-per-share offer. Sprint’s offer has also been contingent upon its deal with SoftBank going through, and Dish Network is also offering a rival bid for Sprint.

Sprint touted the benefits of its increased bid, while also saying it was the company’s “best and final offer.”

“The revised offer demonstrates Sprint’s commitment to closing the Clearwire transaction and improving its competitive position in the U.S. wireless industry,” Sprint said in a statement. “Sprint’s proposal provides a clear path forward for Clearwire and the merger provides attractive value for shareholders of both companies.”

Update, 10:25 a.m.: Crest Financial said it opposes the new bid as well and took issue with Clearwire’s handling of things, saying it should have a competitive bid process if it is going to sell itself.

“Clearwire is acting in its usual stockholder-unfriendly way by adjourning the special meeting to grant Sprint the ability to pose a new, still inadequate offer,” Crest general counsel David K. Schumacher said in a statement. “This is a consistent theme of this Board: Do everything possible to secure an undesirable merger with Sprint at a below market price.”

Crest also sent a letter to Clearwire’s board, urging them to reject the new bid.

The waiver allows Sprint to share certain details with Dish in order that Dish might make a formal bid. Previously, Sprint only had permission to get more information from Dish on its bid.

Both Dish and SoftBank say theirs is the best offer for Sprint. Sprint’s board has recommended approval of the SoftBank offer at a shareholder meeting next month. However, a special committee of Sprint directors is currently evaluating the Dish proposal to see if it might lead to a higher bid.

“We continue to believe that our agreed transaction, which we plan to close in approximately six weeks, creates substantially greater value and provides far greater certainty for Sprint shareholders,” SoftBank Holdings president Ron Fisher said in a statement on Monday. “We are providing this waiver because we are confident in the value of our transaction, and to ensure that Sprint and Softbank can move quickly and with no risk of delay or confusion, towards implementing our detailed investment plans.”

SoftBank said it hopes the waiver will allow the Sprint directors to promptly evaluate Dish’s offer and to complete the SoftBank deal as scheduled by July 1.

While Sprint already owns 51 percent of Clearwire, the deal requires the approval of the majority of shares voted by Clearwire’s other owners.

And the biggest of those — Crest Financial — strongly opposes the deal and has been soliciting votes against it, arguing that Clearwire is worth way more than the $2.97 per share that Sprint has offered. According to a Reuters analysis, the current deal is unlikely to pass. Wall Street also seems to be betting on a higher bid, as Clearwire shares closed trading last week at $3.20.

Crest has also sued to block a Sprint deal, hiring noted law firm Quinn Emanuel to make its case.

Pass or not, though, Sprint itself is still the subject of competing offers. Its board approved a deal with SoftBank. And Dish countered with its own offer. Both sides say their offer is the better one.

Sprint shareholders are due to vote June 12 on the SoftBank deal, an offer that has the backing of Sprint’s board and management. However, a special committee of Sprint directors is considering whether Dish’s intent is likely to lead to a “superior offer.” If so, it could change its stance on the SoftBank deal.

So, basically it’s all clear as mud. We’ll see if things look any clearer after Tuesday’s vote than they do now.

The aluminum-clad phone is similar to the Lumia 920 that has been sold for months at AT&T, as well as the just-introduced Lumia 928 for Verizon. The new phone, being introduced globally and headed here to T-Mobile, features a few new twists.

In addition to its different outer shell, the 925 features an improved camera with a sixth lens (other recent high-end Lumia models have five). The added lens helps better capture natural light.

On the software side, the company is offering what it calls Nokia Smart Camera — a feature that captures 10 images at once, offering the ability to choose the best shot or blend the results into an action shot or one with motion focus. Nokia said the software-based camera features would also be made available for all of Nokia’s other Windows Phone 8 products sometime in the third quarter.

The Lumia 925 is due to go on sale in Europe in June, with T-Mobile’s U.S. launch likely to be the following week. It is priced at 469 euros ($608), though Nokia U.S. head Matt Rothschild said he expected T-Mobile’s upfront price to be under $100.

“We expect really aggressive pricing,” Rothschild said.

With the launch of this phone, the recent announcement of the Lumia 928 at Verizon, as well as the entry-level Lumia 521, also headed for T-Mobile, Rothschild said that Nokia’s U.S. operation has plenty to keep it busy in the months ahead.

Nokia has struggled to make the same kind of inroads in the U.S. market that it has seen in some other places, but Rothschild said he is pleased with where the company finds itself.

“From where we were … basically starting from scratch with Lumia and Windows Phone, I couldn’t be happier with our progress,” Rothschild said.

But imagine a world where you can buy a few hours worth of streaming audio or add unlimited email but only a modest amount of data for other purposes.

That’s just the kind of world being created by a Marc Andreessen-backed startup called ItsOn. The company’s main business plan is selling systems to carriers that would let them offer these kinds of services.

However, to get that business off the ground, ItsOn felt like it needed to create its own service. So on Monday the company is announcing Zact, a consumer cellphone service designed to be cheaper and far more flexible than others on the market.

“We need to do a service and become our own customers to show what’s possible,” ItsOn CEO Greg Raleigh said in an interview.

Whether you want to give your kid more texts, boost your data plan or drop your ex from the account, all these kinds of options can be changed from the phone and on the fly. Want to buy just an hour of video or a month’s worth of email? You can do that, as well.

And if the plan you pick is more than you need, Zact will refund the difference between that plan and the least expensive one that would have matched your usage.

“There’s a way to give people exactly what they want and make a profit,” Raleigh said. Although Zact customers have to pay full price for their phone, they can still save thousands over a two-year contract, Raleigh said.

Another feature is controls that let parents choose not only how much voice, data and texts to give their kids, but also when they can use their device and which apps can run at which times.

Preorders for the service will start on Monday, with devices shipping to consumers by June. Though ItsOn created the service that enabled the flexibility, the underlying network for Zact is Sprint, with ItsOn buying capacity on a wholesale basis.

One big downside initially is Zact’s very limited device portfolio — and that’s putting it mildly. Zact initially only works with two Android phones, the $199 LG Optimus Elite and the $399 LG Viper 4G LTE.

Over time, Zact plans to add phone models as well as tablets and other devices.

But the goal is also to show carriers what’s possible using its service, so that eventually ItsOn can be used by the major operators. And the message is resonating, Raleigh said.

“You see it in their eyes,” he said. “They say, ‘We can be popular.’”

Sprint agreed to buy the half of Clearwire it doesn’t already own for $2.2 billion, or $2.97 a share, but that offer has been opposed by numerous shareholders. Influential adviser Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. is backing Sprint’s bid, saying it falls within “an appropriate valuation range,” while adviser Glass Lewis & Co. holds the opposite view and contends that Sprint didn’t make a strong enough case for its offer.

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The phone will go on sale May 16 for $99 (after a $50 rebate).

It’s a new take on the Lumia 920 that debuted last year. Though generally similar, it features a different screen technology, improved flash and audio recording, and is a bit thinner than the model that has long been on sale at AT&T.

The timing is a bit odd, coming on a Friday and ahead of an event Nokia has next week to talk about what’s next for the Lumia line.

Nokia and Windows Phone as a whole have been slower to bring models to CDMA carriers, focusing much of their time and energy on the more globally used GSM technology at the core of T-Mobile and AT&T’s networks.

Verizon has been selling the Lumia 822, a more midrange model, as well as Windows Phones from Samsung and HTC.

Sprint has said it will offer its first Windows Phone 8 devices this summer.

Meanwhile, two other Nokia models — on sale elsewhere — are just making their way to the U.S. T-Mobile is selling the entry-level Lumia 521 for $150 without subsidies, while AT&T’s new Aio prepaid brand is carrying the Lumia 620.

Which one that is depends, of course, on which company you ask: Dish Network or SoftBank, the two suitors for the No. 3 wireless carrier.

Each thinks it is and their rival is not, which is how contested deals always go — a back and forth of accusations and counter-charges that usually only result in muddying the waters.

Very muddy, in fact. Along with two strong-minded (and, more to the point, voluble) leaders — SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and Dish’s Charlie Ergen — each side has an army of bankers, lawyers and other advisers willing to trot out a number of arguments for why its offer is superior and the myriad risks and downsides to the competitor’s bid.

And of course, the ultimate winner in this battle will have a huge impact on both Sprint itself and the overall level of competition in the U.S. wireless market.

So, for the benefit of the confused individual investors and consumers out there, we’ll try to boil down the points and counterpoints, as well as explain where things go from here.

SoftBank on Why Its Bid Is Better Than Dish’s:

Son made an hour-long, 11-point argument recently for why the Japanese investment and telecom giant’s bid is superior, but it basically boils down to three key points.

1) SoftBank is maintaining that Dish’s bid is actually not as good financially.

“It is incomplete and illusory,” Son said of the Dish bid, who insisted a deal by the satellite behemoth will take longer to complete and create a company swimming in debt. In contrast, Son pointed out that SoftBank is offering to put $8 billion into the company ($3.9 billion of this is already invested, so even if Dish were to prevail, SoftBank would be a significant Sprint shareholder.)

2) SoftBank promises it can get its deal done by July, while a Dish outcome could take well into next year to complete.

3) When it comes to managing things, SoftBank notes that instead of wireless experience, Dish brings only the baggage of its legacy business and a history of litigation with its partners.

SoftBank, as it touts itself, has experience running wireless companies and can offer improved scale to Sprint when it comes to buying network equipment and handsets.

“We are the world’s largest customer for many of these vendors,” Son said, emphasizing the buying power that Sprint would gain with companies such as Samsung, Ericsson and Apple. “Dish has zero expertise in our mobile industry.”

Dish, on Why Its Bid Is Better Than Softbank’s:

Dish’s main point is that its offer is just flat-out more money.

“It’s a higher financial offer,” Ergen said. “At Dish’s current stock price, our cash and the value of our shares … it’s about $7.10. The counter-offer from SoftBank is about $6.38. In fact, that’s not my words; that’s from Sprint’s own proxy.”

As for the fact its deal will take longer, Ergen says it won’t take as long as Sprint maintains and said the higher offer more than accounts for the delay.

But Ergen says Dish’s bid has several other advantages as well.

1) Dish brings a bunch of its own spectrum, representing airwaves that Sprint will inevitably need. By combining with Dish, Dish insists, Sprint will save itself from spending billions of dollars later.

2) The combined Dish/Sprint would be able to offer a combination of video, voice and data services. On the other hand, Sprint under SoftBank will have some additional capital, Dish says, but in essence be the same company that is today struggling to compete against larger rivals such as AT&T and Verizon.

3) While SoftBank is offering a bunch of cash up front, Dish said it will bring more ongoing value by virtue of various synergies, as well as the cash flow from Dish’s existing business.

“We’re bringing $20 billion of equity to the merger,” Ergen said. “I’m bringing $10 billion of equity personally. I’m taking my entire net worth and putting it into a Dish/Sprint transaction.”

Beyond the dollars-and-sense arguments, Ergen is attempting to wrap his deal in the flag, noting that his bid will create an American-owned company with Americans making the decisions, while SoftBank’s bid will put Sprint in foreign hands.

“Culturally we are much more aligned with Sprint today than probably a foreign company would be,” Ergen said. “A Japanese culture would be different than a U.S. culture. Our language is different; our culture is different. It doesn’t make their culture bad; they have a great culture. But it’s different.”

Subtle much?

Where things go from here:

Sprint is moving ahead to get all the regulatory and shareholder approvals that it needs with a goal of having the deal ready to close on July 1. A shareholder vote on SoftBank’s proposal is slated for June 12.

However, Sprint’s board has a duty to explore Dish’s bid, so it has formed a special committee to do that. That group of five independent directors — which has its own bankers and legal advisers — is in the early stages of evaluating Dish’s offer, having gotten permission from SoftBank to seek more information from the satellite company. Its job is to “provide its assessment to the full board in due course whether the proposal is, or is reasonably likely to lead to, a superior offer.”

But while Sprint is getting more information from Dish to understand its bid, information is not, at this point, flowing in the other direction. Sprint is not sharing any non-public info with Dish, meaning that Dish can’t yet undertake the due dilligence needed to make a formal bid and arrange financing.

For that to happen, Dish needs a determination from Sprint’s board committee that Dish’s interest could well lead to a superior offer. That would then pave the way for Sprint to crack open the books and Dish to make its offer.

Clearwire Muddies Things Further

A complicating factor in all this is Clearwire. Sprint already owns the majority of the wireless network operator and is seeking to buy the rest of the company to boost its spectrum position. Sprint’s bid, though, is contingent on the SoftBank deal going through.

Dish had also tried to buy Clearwire before it made its offer for Sprint. Clearwire, though, is moving forward to close its deal with Sprint, though a dissident shareholder is seeking to block the deal both through a lawsuit and proxy battle.

So where does this leave things?

For the moment, investors are betting that the existence of two interested parties will mean a higher offer from someone. Shares closed on Wednesday at $7.32, higher than either company’s current offer for the company.

Meanwhile, it’s business as usual for Sprint and its customers, with little near-term impact expected as the company continues playing catch-up with AT&T and Verizon in the race to cover America with a next-generation LTE network.

A teardown analysis conducted by the market research firm IHS, due to be released tomorrow, has pegged Samsung’s cost of materials and manufacturing to produce the U.S. version of the 32 gigabyte model of the S4 at slightly above $237 per unit. Without a contract subsidy, the entry-level 16GB version of the phone costs $639 when sold by AT&T Wireless.

The cost is somewhat higher than that of Apple’s iPhone 5, the base model of which costs $205 to build for a 16GB version, according to an IHS analysis conducted last fall. It’s also well above the cost of Nokia’s Lumia 900, which costs $209 to build, IHS found at the time.

The S4 cost is not far below the cost of Samsung’s larger Galaxy Note tablet, the cost of which IHS estimated last year to be $270.

Most phone manufacturers source their components from many different suppliers. But Samsung, a large, diversified manufacturer of many different kinds of electronic components, has used its significant capabilities to supply itself with many of the key parts inside most versions of the S4 phone sold around the world.

“Samsung’s strength is this ability to in-source to itself,” IHS analyst Vincent Leung said in an interview. “They just keep adding to the list of components that they can supply to themselves.”

One key component that Samsung did not supply to itself for versions of the phone being sold in the U.S. was the main applications processor. U.S. versions of the phone contain a Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, which contributes $20 to the overall cost.

Versions of the phone sold in Korea and other markets around the world contain a Samsung-made chip called the Exynos 5 Octa that costs $28. Samsung is known to be manufacturing at least four variations of the phone for different market geographies around the world, including at least two being sold in the U.S., one going to AT&T and T-Mobile, and another going to Verizon Wireless and Sprint, said Andrew Rassweiler, another IHS analyst.

“Samsung is demonstrating its ability to suit the tastes of carriers in different regions of the world,” Rassweiler said. “It comes down to what the market is willing to spend on the features offered.”

The fact that Samsung used the Qualcomm-made chip is a testament to the U.S. chipmaker’s prowess. “Even with all the vertical integration it’s doing, it’s not like Samsung has given up on Qualcomm,” Rassweiler said.

One interesting difference between the U.S. and Korean versions resulted from the difference in the choice of processor. U.S. versions of the phone contain an image-processing chip made by Japan’s Fujitsu that added $1.50 to the total cost. Leung says that in the Korean versions, some of the image processing is handed off to Samsung’s Exynos chip.

Samsung also supplied the flash memory used to store data on the device. IHS estimates that 16GB of memory added $28 to the cost of the device.

The Korean giant also supplied itself with a display and touchscreen parts, which added $75 to the cost of components. The combined display package also includes Gorilla Glass, a strong glass material made by U.S.-based Corning.

Samsung is also thought to have supplied itself with several unlabeled components, including the camera module and some wireless baseband chips.

A few non-Samsung suppliers include Broadcom, which provided Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips; Maxim, which provided a power-management chip; and Triquint Semiconductor, which provided some wireless chips.

Crest, Clearwire’s largest minority shareholder, also said it has mailed its proxy as it seeks to defeat the deal in a vote of shareholders.

Crest argues that Clearwire’s board is breaching its duties in approving a deal to sell the company to Sprint, which already owns a controlling interest in Clearwire. Sprint has offered $2.97 per share, an amount that Crest maintains undervalues the company.

“Sprint owes fiduciary duties — duties of loyalty and trust — which require it to protect the interests of the company’s minority stockholders,” Quinn said in a statement. “But instead of acting consistent with those duties, Sprint is thumbing its nose at the other stockholders and seeking to force a sale of Clearwire at a grossly inadequate price. Clearwire directors are doing Sprint’s bidding.”

Quinn is known for representing a wide range of tech firms in litigation, including its recent role on behalf of Samsung in its patent trial against Apple.

Four other minority shareholders joined Crest last week in opposing the deal.

In addition to the proxy battle, Crest has sued Clearwire, its board and Sprint in Delaware court, the case for which it has hired Quinn.

“The battle for Clearwire has just begun,” Crest wrote in its proxy, which was declared effective by the Securities and Exchange Commission last week after being initially filed in April.

In December, Clearwire’s majority owner, Sprint, offered to buy the rest of Clearwire that it doesn’t own for $2.2 billion, or $2.97 a share. The next month, satellite TV company Dish Network Corp. bid $3.30 a share, and Clearwire shares have traded well above the Sprint offer since. Dish since has bid for the entirety of Sprint, putting its Clearwire bid in question.

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U.S. Cellular maintained at the time that the numbers just didn’t add up. On Friday, though, the company announced that it plans to start selling Apple products later this year.

“We have a number of strategies in progress to increase loyalty and attract more customers, including our announcement today that we will begin offering Apple products later this year,” the company said in a statement accompanying its first-quarter earnings. “By further strengthening our device portfolio, we’ll give consumers another great reason to switch to U.S. Cellular, and enable our existing customers to choose from an even wider variety of iconic smartphones, and enjoy the outstanding U.S. Cellular customer experiences they deserve.”

We checked in to see what has changed, and here’s what U.S. Cellular told AllThingsD: “We will be selling iPhone products later this year. We don’t have any additional information at this time but will follow up closer to the launch. The deal we’ve made to sell iPhone products is right for our business today, because we now have an LTE solution that enables a successful partnership with Apple.”

So it remains to be seen which Apple products U.S. Cellular will sell. And, of course, it’s hard to know if the company got a better deal this time around than the one it was offered back in 2011.

Apple is known for driving tough bargains in exchange for allowing carriers to sell the iPhone — arrangements that often include hefty guaranteed minimum commitments.

With the deal done, the company will turn to the task of rapidly integrating the prepaid carrier into its existing business and technology roadmap.

The company has been working on integration plans for months and aims to hit the ground running. CTO Neville Ray promised that the company is well aware of what happened to Sprint when it bought Nextel and is taking pains to avoid that fate.

T-Mobile plans to keep MetroPCS as a separate brand targeting different demographics. That means operating separate stores and maintaining both brands. Plus, T-Mobile has the opportunity to now expand the brand into markets that MetroPCS had missed out on due to a lack of spectrum.

However, T-Mobile hopes to quickly start selling new and renewing MetroPCS customers on a new crop of devices that run on T-Mobile’s spectrum.

“This isn’t about integrating these two networks,” Ray said in an October interview. “It’s about moving MetroPCS over to a bigger and stronger converged network.”

Meanwhile, T-Mobile has made a number of big moves separate from the MetroPCS deal. Last month it announced a plan to scrap phone subsidies, eliminate long-term contracts and, at long last add the iPhone to its lineup.

And the company has spent $4 billion modernizing its network, moving to more widely adopted spectrum and adopting LTE.

In acquiring MetroPCS, T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom also turns T-Mobile USA into a publicly traded company, albeit one still three-quarters owned by the German telecommunications firm. (T-Mobile will trade under the ticker symbol “TMUS” on the New York Stock Exchange.)

That said, one big thing hasn’t changed. T-Mobile remains the No. 4 U.S. carrier and even with MetroPCS, it will significantly trail its top three rivals in all measures of scale.

Update: T-Mobile’s investor relations website has been updated to reflect the combination as having taken place, with its executive leadership team updated to list Thomas Keys as Executive VP and operating chief of the MetroPCS business unit. Meanwhile, MetroPCS’ investor relations page now points to T-Mobile.

In December, Sprint offered to buy the rest of Clearwire in a $2.2 billion deal, and provided the wireless broadband operator up to $800 million in financing that it could draw on in installments of $80 million over 10 months. The company didn’t take that funding in January or February, as it was considering an offer from satellite TV company Dish Network Corp., DISH +2.03% but took the cash in March and April.

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That’s the good news in a report from RootMetrics, which measures real-world cellphone performance nationwide.

Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile all reduced their call failure rates from the first half of the year to the second, according to RootMetrics. Verizon’s rate increased fractionally, but was still an industry-best 0.7 percent for the second half of the year.

“In 2012, we found strong call performances from all carriers: the gap between each carrier’s average rate of call failures (dropped and blocked calls) was relatively minor,” RootMetrics said in its report.

Data speeds, meanwhile, are also showing across-the-board improvement as the major carriers spend billions to expand LTE service nationwide. Verizon was the first, and has the largest LTE network, but all its rivals are working hard to catch up.

A separate report from RootMetrics released earlier this year showed AT&T with the fastest LTE network and Verizon with the broadest LTE coverage.

“Due to overwhelming global demand of Galaxy S 4, the initial supply may be limited,” a Samsung representative told AllThingsD. “We expect to fulfill inventory to meet demands in the coming weeks.”

Earlier on Wednesday, T-Mobile and Sprint both said that full retail availability of the Samsung flagship device would come later than expected.

“We had planned to launch this next generation of the award-winning Samsung Galaxy line-up on Saturday, April 27,” Sprint said in a statement. “Unfortunately, due to unexpected inventory challenges from Samsung, we will be slightly delayed with our full product launch.”

AT&T, meanwhile, said it plans to start selling the S 4 on Saturday, as expected.

Greenpeace praised Google and SoftBank for their energy investments (Google has funded $1 billion in clean energy projects since 2010) and legislative advocacy. Cisco won praise for its long-term commitments to move away from coal.

Meanwhile, Wipro and Sprint worked on behalf of renewable energy legislation in India and the U.S. over the past year.

Hewlett-Packard is credited for increasing its products’ energy efficiency by 50 percent since 2005. And way down in 12th place, Microsoft is described as “most improved” for its work on wind energy tax incentives, though it was dinged for giving money to fossil fuel lobbying groups.

Greenpeace’s scoring system is somewhat opaque (it’s explained in detail here), but it evaluates operations, products and pro-green advocacy. With a total possible score of 100, Google and Cisco tied, with 58 points each.

But, um, aren’t there a few tech companies missing here? Greenpeace said it did not include Apple, Facebook and Amazon in the report “because their operations are not broad enough to be compared to companies who offer energy solutions to climate change as core aspects of their business models” — though that seems a bit arbitrary, especially if Google is being counted. Apple, especially, has tussled with Greenpeace in the past over descriptions of its energy usage.

“We had planned to launch this next generation of the award-winning Samsung Galaxy line-up on Saturday, April 27,” Sprint said in a statement. “Unfortunately, due to unexpected inventory challenges from Samsung, we will be slightly delayed with our full product launch.”

The No. 3 U.S. carrier still expects to make it available online and via phone sales Saturday, with retail-store launches once supply increases.

Update: T-Mobile said it, too, is pushing things back.

“We know customers are really looking forward to getting their new Samsung Galaxy S 4 soon,” T-Mobile said in a statement. “However, due to an unexpected delay with inventory deliveries, the Galaxy S 4 will not be available on www.T-Mobile.com as planned today. Instead, online availability is expected to begin on Monday, April 29. We apologize for any inconvenience and are working with Samsung to deliver the device to T-Mobile customers as soon as possible.”

As for stores, T-Mobile said the Galaxy S 4 is now expected in selected T-Mobile stores and other retailers on May 8, with nationwide retail availability starting May 15.

AT&T, by contrast, says its planned Saturday launch is on schedule. “We are on track with our planned April 27th in-store launch of the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and are excited to hear what our customers think of this highly anticipated smartphone,” a representative told AllThingsD.

Verizon, meanwhile, has said it will start taking preorders on Thursday but won’t have the Galaxy S 4 available until May 30.

FreedomPop plans to start offering the Overdrive Pro hotspot, which works on both WiMax and Sprint’s 3G network. FreedomPop plans to offer products on Sprint’s LTE network later in the year.

“The biggest criticism with our service to date has been the coverage gaps in certain parts of the country,” FreedomPop CEO Stephen Stokols said in a statement. “We’re planning on launching our full national LTE roll-out by the end of this year, but until then, adding nationwide 3G coverage gives users the ability to connect from anywhere.”

As with other FreedomPop plans, users get a certain amount of data free (in this case, 500 megabytes), and can pay a fee for additional data or other services. The device will sell for $40, or users can trade up from FreedomPop’s existing hotspot.

That compares to an operating loss of $255 million in the year-ago quarter on a roughly similar revenue base. The company reported a net loss of $643 million, or 21 cents per share, compared to a net loss of $863 million, or 29 cents per share in the first quarter of 2012.

The No. 3 U.S. carrier said that 86 percent of Sprint-branded phone sales were smartphones, and said it tallied more than five million smartphone sales, including 1.5 million iPhones during the quarter.

“This is a transformative year for Sprint, and we’ve gotten off to a good start,” Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said in a statement.

Sprint, which announced its plans to sell a majority stake to SoftBank, has said it will evaluate the recent offer from Dish, while SoftBank says it still hopes to complete the Sprint deal by July.

Update: In a conference call with investors, Hesse noted that the pending and potential deals make this an exciting time, but added, “We haven’t taken our eye off of operations.”

The company remains on track to shut down its Nextel network by June 30, with plans to start deploying LTE service on that 800MHz spectrum by the fourth quarter.

Hesse said that the company remains on track to close its pending SoftBank and Clearwire deals by July, but added that the company won’t be discussing those efforts on the call.