Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

AT&T Does Just Fine Without iPhone Exclusivity

AT&Ts first full quarter without the iPhone all to itself in the U.S. didn’t turn out so bad after all. In reporting its second quarter earnings, the carrier said it sold 3.6 million iPhones during the quarter, which amounts to more than 17 percent of the 20.34 million Apple said it sold during the quarter. Nearly a quarter of those who bought an iPhone on AT&T were new to its network, the company said.

IPhone sales helped AT&T blow past the estimates of analysts. Sales, at $31.5 billion, were up by 2.2 percent and beat the consensus expectation of analysts. It reported a per-share profit of 60 cents, which was in line with the consensus. Net income declined by 10 percent year on year.

One trick AT&T had pulled during the quarter to keep iPhone sales buoyant was to offer the older iPhone 3GS for $49. Apple brought the iPhone to Verizon Wireless in February, ending an exclusive arrangement that AT&T had enjoyed since the iPhone’s launch in 2007.

Over all, AT&T added 1.1 million subscribers during the quarter and now has a subscriber base of 98.6 million.

Smartphones accounted for nearly 70 percent of phones sold on a post-paid basis. The total sold was 5.6 million units. Of those, 40 percent, or about two million, were Android phones, BlackBerry or Windows Phone 7 devices, with Android sales doubling from a year ago.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald