sale posts
by Darren Murph, posted Jan 16th 2009 @ 1:50AM 
Peek's kinda-sorta email-only handheld is one of the more polarizing devices to hit this year. On one hand, anyone who cares that much about email in their pocket probably already owns an email-capable handset; on the other, those satisfied with their pay-as-you-go phone may seriously be interested in adding this to their arsenal. Regardless of your take on things, we figured you should know that it's available for "today only" at $49.95, clearly setting the bar for a Cyber Wednesday in years to come. 'Course, that $19.95 per month data requirement isn't going anywhere, but half a Benjamin might be worth it just to crack this sucker open and test your hacking skills.
by Darren Murph, posted Oct 28th 2008 @ 11:58AM
If you're a non-T-Mobile customer jonesing for a G1 and you don't mind the prospect of waiting in a line of epic, new video game console proportions, head on out to San Francisco today where T-Mob's corporate location at 3rd and Market will become the first store anywhere to offer the G1 to the general public starting at 6PM. That's a full fourteen hours earlier than the rest of the country; the remainder of T-Mobile's stores in 3G markets will start pushing Android out the door at 8AM Wednesday morning. So, how crazy are you? Book those flights, people -- time's running out!
That sale of virtually all of Sprint's tower infrastructure announced back in July has now been finalized, giving buyer TowerCo a whole boatload of CDMA, iDEN, and WiMAX footprint it didn't have just a few hours ago. Sprint looks at the $670 million sale as a way to buy itself some "additional liquidity" and "focus more closely on our core business of providing communications services to our customers" (but let's be honest, it's really just about the additional liquidity); TowerCo, meanwhile, sounds like it's anticipating that it'll be able to lease out space on the towers to other carriers as they expand down the road. For its part, Sprint wasted no time signing up for a long-term lease on the very towers it just sold, but here's our doozy of a question: dare we say they're now a TowerCo MVNO?
Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has all but confirmed in an investors' conference this week the longstanding rumor that his company is looking for someone to buy its iDEN network, the main asset brought on in its 2004 acquisition of Nextel. With its EV-DO Rev. A-based Direct Connect system rapidly coming online, iDEN seems to make less and less sense for Sprint in the long term -- but the real question is whether anyone's going to be willing to pay enough to make it worth Sprint's while to part with Nextel's legacy. Hesse basically says that they could go either way; if they see a deal they like, they'll take it, but if they don't, they're cool hanging onto it because it's "a valuable asset." Besides, where else are you going to find beauts like the i365?Still committed to iDEN, eh? After another relatively brutal quarter of lost cash, lost subscribers, and lost opportunities, word on the street is that Sprint might be rethinking its approach to its legacy push-to-talk network -- the obsolescence-bound spectrum it acquired via its purchase of Nextel a few years back for the questionable price of $35 billion. Given Sprint's current financial state, a liquidity crunch means that the carrier is looking to offload any salable piece; Nextel's not exactly the most attractive piece of that puzzle with a declining subscriber base, limited bandwidth, and a limited range of Moto hardware to back it up, but even at its current estimated value of $5 billion, analysts are suggesting that Sprint could be willing to bite at a deal. NII Holdings, which operates iDEN networks under the Nextel brand in Brazil, Mexico, and a handful of other Latin American countries, is being tossed around as a potential suitor, as are private equity firms looking to make a quick buck. How one goes about making a quick buck on a network as old and quirky as iDEN in the year 2008, though, remains to be seen.
Just as July began, we heard that Sprint would finally begin shipping its Airave signal booster nationwide before the month ended. It cut things close, but we can't deny that the rumor proved true. Starting right now, Sprint users with horrendous service in their own homes can begrudgingly cough up $99.99 to have the base station sent directly to you. From there, you'll have to throw down $4.99 per month for extending your coverage but still using your plan minutes, $10 per month if you're looking to make unlimited calls (through the Airave) with a single Sprint phone or $20 per month for unlimited calling for multiple lines. Critics have already harshed on the $50 increase in price from when it launched in Denver and Indy last year, not to mention the relatively high monthly fees, but we suppose you can take it or leave it depending on how regularly you drop calls from your couch. Oh, and don't even think of using this overseas -- the required GPS module makes sure you're in the US before enabling calls.
