“AT&T is hoping for a happy holiday when it comes to smartphone sales,” Roger Cheng reports for CNET. “The wireless carrier is selling smartphones at a record pace — 6.4 million already in the first two months of the quarter, according to Ralph de la Vega, CEO of AT&T’s mobility arm. De la Vega, speaking at an investor conference today, said he now expects to sell 26 million smartphones this year, 1 million more than previously expected.”
“De la Vega said the first two months of sales alone would give the company the second best quarter of smartphone sales, and sales typically ramp up going into the last month,” Cheng reports. “De la Vega was also bullish on tablets, noting the company’s recent $100 promotion and the mobile data share plan have driven interest in the area… ‘I can’t fathom how many tablets will be under the Christmas tree,’ he said.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: iPhone 5.
And iPad and iPad mini.
Merry Christmas, Apple!
[Attribution: MacRumors. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
Related article:
Growing anticipation for next-gen Apple iPhone creates ‘mother of all handset pauses’ – July 20, 2012
At its website AT&T echoes the handwriting on the wall of inevitability, as it advertises “3G, 4G & LTE Tablets & iPad”. Could the product differentiation be any more blatant? There are tablets, and there’s iPad.
4G makes AT&T the easy choice for me. When I don’t have LTE, I have 4G. 4G is still very fast. With Verizon, you get slow 3G when not in LTE.
Wait a minute: I must have heard Bob Pisani report 4 or 5 times on CNBC Wednesday that the word from AT&T’s de la Vega at the telecom conference was that AT&T’s smartphone and tablet sales were ‘nothing to write home about,’ (paraphrase) and that modest iPhone sales could be extrapolated from that comment which in turn could be a reason for the selloff in AAPL. Others on CNBC also echoed the Pisani remark a few more times.
It has become painful to watch CNBC as they whipsaw the retail investor between greed and fear. Last week Apple was a generational opprotunity as an investment, today it is dead money. The truth is that only one or two of them understand technology and echo what is currently commanding an audience (which is what they are trying to achieve). When the one or two of them, who know what is going on are missing, it is almost comical as to what comes out of their pea brains.
maybe most smartphones are samsung?
The US will be 75% iPhone next year. The rest will be Galaxy among the geeks and xPhone for .net programmers.