Michelle Maisto

Research firm IDC has confirmed what Apple’s most recent earnings report suggested: that worldwide tablet sales are slowing. During the first quarter of the year, worldwide tablet shipments fell nearly 36 percent from the earlier, holiday-benefiting quarter, and grew just 4 percent over the same period a year ago. The slowdown was felt across screen […]

AT&T has approached satellite-TV company DirecTV about the possibility of an acquisition, the Wall Street Journal reported May 1. Such a deal would put the combined company—AT&T’s nearly 6 million television customers and DirecTV’s 20 million—in a position to compete against a combined Comcast and Time Warner Cable (TWC), which would have nearly 30 million […]

Sprint earlier this year took a break from considering an acquisition of rival T-Mobile, amidst negative public reaction to the deal. The response surprised Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and Chairman Masayoshi Son, a source told the Wall Street Journal in February, adding that they had decided to let the feedback “sink in” and take some […]

T-Mobile hinted at a killer first quarter and on May 1 it delivered, announcing the addition of 2.4 million customers. More than 1.3 million of the new customers were branded, postpaid subscribers, and 1.2 million of those were phone customers. To new and existing customers, T-Mobile sold 6.9 million smartphones during the quarter. Not only […]

Microsoft completed its $7.5 billion purchase of Nokia’s Devices and Services business on Friday, April 25, and with it began the new process of explaining to the world quite what that means. “As Microsoft and Nokia Devices and Services come together as an expanded family, we will unify our passion, dedication and commitment to bringing […]

Nokia, the nearly 150-year-old Finnish company that early on focused on rubber, forestry and cables, is in the process of reinventing itself yet again. On Friday, April 25, Nokia completed the $7.5 billion sale of its Devices and Services business to Microsoft. The company that was for years the worldwide leader in mobile phone sales, […]

Sprint, HTC Partner With Harman, Spotify to Push for a Win by Michelle Maisto HTC One (M8)-Harman Kardon Edition Hours after announcing a quarterly loss of $151 million, Sprint introduced an improved version of the HTC One (M8)—a smartphone that’s already been called the best Android phone available. The phone can take advantage of Sprint’s […]

If more evidence were required to prove the whiplash pace at which the wearable device industry is growing, Amazon offered it April 29, with its launch of a Wearable Technology store. Though, to call it a store may be too reductionist, as what Amazon offers is a full education for shoppers, complete with explanatory videos […]

NEW YORK—Sprint and HTC’s One (M8) flagship smartphone each just got a little better. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, at a press event here just hours after hosting Sprint’s first-quarter 2014 earnings call, literally lifted the veil off a new smartphone for the network, an already improved version of the just-released HTC One (M8). Flanking Hesse […]

Sprint’s message continues to be: We’re getting there. The carrier, the first of its peers to offer 4G services, albeit via WiMax technology, has been racing to dismantle the old Nextel and 3G networks and roll out Long Term Evolution (LTE), as well as Sprint Spark, which uses a combination of network and on-device technologies […]

Comcast, as part of its ongoing efforts to win regulatory approval of its proposed $45 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC), has said it will divest 30 percent of its subscribers. On April 28, it announced it has a deal in the works with rival cable company Charter Communications that will accomplish exactly that. […]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has begun filling in some details about how it will run its first-ever incentive auction. Planned for mid-2015, the auction will reallocate low-band spectrum—or, spectrum below 1GHz—that has been given up by television broadcasters and is particularly valuable to wireless carriers for its ability to penetrate (and so offer strong […]