Best Buy sees big drop in TV sales, eases pain with beefy mobile revenue
Best Buy's stock took a 14.8 percent beating today on news that it earned $217 million in the third quarter -- a 4.4 percent decline year over year -- and felt compelled to revise its fourth quarter forecast downwards. The reason? Seems folks are holding off on buying televisions in a big way: the company suffered a "low-double digit' decline in boob tube sales, even worse than an industry average in the single digits, which would suggest that 2010's 3D revolution hasn't attracted the kind of consumer attention manufacturers (and content providers) would've liked
Categories: Mobile Phone Tags: beating-today, bestbuy, consumer, devices, digit-increases, entry, financial, fourth, mobile-revenue, result, revolution-hasn, sales, stock
What financial trouble? Modu T goes on sale in UK
Modu might be on life support , but that doesn't mean that its latest effort -- the touch-enabled Modu T -- isn't seeing the light of day. British retailer PurelyGadgets (which also launched the original Modu earlier this year) has just announced that it has the new model in stock, charging
Categories: Mobile Phone Tags: capable, conversation, engadget-mobile, entry, financial, lightest, microsd, mobile, modu t, point, pull-it-out, qvga, Supply
Motorola’s mobile unit posts first operating profit in a long, long time
As a whole, Motorola is no stranger to profit... thing is, Moto won't be "whole" for much longer , and when the split happens, we're sure it'd like all of its divisions to be profitable. The mobile unit, of course, has been the struggling one, trying to pull out of a multi-year post- RAZR nosedive under the leadership of CEO Sanjay Jha -- and it looks like his all-in bet on Android is starting to pay off at the bank on today's news that they've posted a non-GAAP operating profit of $3 million.
Categories: Android, Mobile Phone Tags: celebration, entirety, financial, leadership, moto, motorola, nosedive-under, profit, q4 2010, rolling-toward, the-struggling, time, unit
Verizon adds fewer customers than AT&T in Q3, race for first place gets tight
By subscriber count, Verizon had vaulted into first place by a pretty comfortable margin following its Alltel acquisition , but AT&T added significantly more customers this last quarter than Big Red did -- and just like that, the battle for first place among the US national carriers is starting to get hot again. Verizon added 997,000 customers (excluding acquisitions) in the July through September period versus AT&T's beefy 2.6 million, meaning AT&T now stands at some 92.8 million -- just 400,000 or so fewer that Verizon's headcount
Categories: Mobile Phone Tags: count, entry, financial, first-place, period-versus, q32010, quarter, result, stands-at-some, verizon, verizon-wireless, vzw
HTC grows profits in Q3 to $360 million, revenues rise to $2.45b
It's good to see that HTC's omnipresence in the smartphone market is paying off in nicely growing financial figures as well.
Categories: Android, htc, Mobile Phone Tags: 2010, again-fingered, catalyst, financial, grows-profits, nicely-growing, revenues-were, taiwanese, tally, today-touting
Android accounts for one-quarter of mobile web traffic, says Quantcast
It's terribly difficult to get reliable statistics, as numbers tend to vary drastically depending upon whom you ask, but if you're inclined to believe that Android is mopping up Apple and RIM's declining mobile mindshare in the US, you'll find nothing but corroboration from Quantcast. The analytics firm reckons a full one-quarter of mobile web traffic stateside comes from devices running Google's OS, though it's important to know that the iOS tallies apparently don't include the web-friendly iPad .
Categories: Android, Mobile Phone, Other Tags: analytics-firm, apple, entry, figures, financial, find-nothing, metrics, our-internet, platformwars, statistics, the-disclaimers, web, web usage, webusage
LG, Samsung report earnings, phone businesses not in perfect health
South Korean archrivals Samsung and LG have both come clean with their second-quarter earnings this week. While there's still black ink across the board, LG suffered a 33 percent decline in net profit year-over-year, undoubtedly due in large part to a little bit of bleeding going on in the giant mobile division where they've posted a year-over-year loss "due to investment in R&D and expansion of channels in emerging markets for future development." Samsung, meanwhile, saw a 7.2 percent profit margin in its mobile business and a respectable 22 percent year-over-year improvement in shipments, but it came at the cost of higher price pressures -- margins are razor-thin for these guys, and they seem to be getting even smaller
Categories: Mobile Phone Tags: bleeding-going, financial, flood-the-low, ink, korean, mobile, net, q210, samsung, south-korean, take-superhuman
Sprint’s Hesse: there’s ‘logic’ to a T-Mobile merger — if they both move to LTE
Sprint's riffed about the possibility of migrating to LTE in the past -- as has its 4G partner, Clearwire -- so it's no big surprise to hear CEO Dan Hesse tell the Financial Times today that he's still open to the idea down the road, possibly side-by-side with the company's existing WiMAX deployment thanks to its deep spectrum holdings. What's far more interesting, though, is his concession that there's "logic" to exploring a merger with T-Mobile USA in the event that they both move to LTE for their next-gen networks
Categories: Mobile Phone Tags: 2008-on-grounds, acquisition, ceo, dan, dan hesse, danhesse, entry, financial, hesse, past, surprise, telekom, usa
Lenovo’s Liu Chuanzhi: ‘we are lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn’t care about China’
We're guessing that Lenovo chairman Liu Chaunzhi didn't intend spark a slew of sensational headlines when he spoke briefly with the Financial Times this week, but he did make a few statements that are hard to ignore (yet easily misinterpreted).
Categories: Mobile Phone, Other Tags: apple, china, consumer, engadget, financial, financial-times, slew, Steve, steve-jobs, stevejobs
HP laying off some Palm staff as integration begins
It's not totally unexpected, but apparently HP is laying off some Palm staffers now that the buyout is official .
Categories: Mobile Phone Tags: certainly-makes, consolidation, employees, financial, fri, integration, merger, palm, result, stability, strategy, support, things-digital, turmoil