Sprint Nextel on Friday announced the appointment of Ryan Siurek as vice president and controller.

Siurek, 38, will also serve as the principal accounting officer.

He had previously served as vice president, assistant controller at Sprint. Siurek joined Sprint in January after working at LyondellBasell Industries.

From Bloomberg News
AT&T completed its $945 million purchase of Centennial Communications Corp., expanding network coverage in Puerto Rico and the Midwest and Southeast.

AT&T, which agreed to pay $8.50 a share and take on about $2 billion in debt for Centennial, made the announcement in a statement today. Regulators approved the deal with conditions Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission said on its Web site.

The Star's television critic Aaron Barnhart wrote this review.

Droid, the so-called iPhone killer that uses the Android 2.0 operating system from Google, goes on sale Friday morning at Verizon Wireless stores.

Among iPhone nation, the reaction to Verizon’s in-your-face marketing campaign for the Droid — those “iDon’t” commercials that mock the supposed shortcomings of America’s favorite smartphone — has ranged from bemusement to irritation to litigation.

Sprint bolstered its smartphone line-up Thursday, adding the BlackBerry Curve 8530.

The phone features an easier to you system for music, and comes preloaded with several applications, including BlackBerry Media Sync, Sprint Music Store and Sprint TV.

From Bloomberg News

Research In Motion Ltd., the maker of the BlackBerry, and HTC Corp. took a larger share of the worldwide market for mobile phones in the third quarter with new models, research firm IDC said.

Shipments of so-called smart phones, which provide Internet access and the ability to download new programs, climbed 4.2 percent to 43.3 million in the third quarter from a year earlier.

Talk about pricey. Chinese consumers need to pony up more than $1,000 to purchase an iPhone in that country.

That compares with $299 in the United States.

No wonder Apple's Chinese partner has sold only about 5,000 iPhone's since being offered a week ago. And this in the world's biggest mobile phone market.

In addition to the hefty price tag, the Chinese version of the iPhone does not have the Wi-Fi networking features available in other countries.

Sprint Nextel Corp. plans to trim jobs “in the dozens” from its wholesale division amid slowing business.

The wireless provider confirmed Tuesday that it has begun notifying employees in the division of layoffs.

Kathleen Dunleavy, a spokeswoman for the company, wouldn’t say how many jobs are being cut other than it would be “in the dozens” and fewer than 100.

The division employs 575 people, mostly in the Kansas City area.

From Bloomberg News

AT&T Inc. sued rival Verizon Wireless, saying its advertising about network coverage is misleading.

Verizon’s ads use large areas of white space in maps of so- called 3G network coverage areas to indicate that AT&T customers are “out of touch” in vast parts of the U.S., according to the complaint filed in federal court in Atlanta.

“Contrary to the misleading message conveyed in Verizon’s advertisements, AT&T customers can fully use their wireless devices outside of a 3G coverage area and undisputedly have coverage in areas depicted by the white or blank spaces,” AT&T’s Mobility unit said today in the court document.

From Fierce Wireless

Sprint Nextel launched its first netbook, joining rivals AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless in the netbook craze. Operators have increasingly turned to devices like ereaders and netbooks as additional sources of mobile data revenue.

Sprint will offer the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 Netbook (a version of which AT&T also offers). The device has an EV-Do Rev. A connection, a 10.1-inch LED screen, a built-in 1.3-megapixel webcam and a 160 GB hard drive.

Color in the areas of Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Charlotte, N.C., Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and Greensboro, N.C., on Sprint’s widening map of 4G, fourth-generation, wireless service areas.

Those investment minds at the Motley Fool don’t seem to have any answers for Sprint Nextel’s problems.

Still, their reaction to the company’s recent quarterly report provides something of a what’s-wrong round up.

The theme seems to be that Sprint is caught in an untenable middle position.

Wall Street took another loss of Sprint subscribers in stride, with shares holding on to some of Thursday’s gain ahead of the morning report.

But Sprint management still says it intends to reverse subscriber trends and, by doing so, produce a better bottom line.

CEO Dan Hesse told analysts this morning that the company began to gain some ground in the third quarter toward reaching its elusive goals.

Sprint Nextel Corp. plans to release its third quarter earnings at 6 a.m. Central on Thursday.

Analysts estimate net losses will total about 15 cents a share, according to Bloomberg News.

But traders headed into the report with some optimism, boosting Sprint shares by 7 cents Wednesday to reach $3.24 at the close of trading.

And that gain came on an ugly day that took the Dow Jones industrial average down by 1.2 percent and the Nasdaq by 2.7 percent.

Google introduced its free navigation system for mobile phones this morning, bringing free turn-by-turn directions to smartphones using its Android 2.0 operating system.

If the service takes off, it could cut into sales of GPS devices offered by Garmin and TomTom.

Garmin this month introduced its Nuvifone in the U.S., a smartphone offering its top-of-the-line navigation services.

The New York Times, quoting a study by Forrester Research, noted that it would take time for the Google service to change the market. But by 2013, the study said, phone-based naviagion systems are expected to dominate the market.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that for many of the 1,000-plus developers at the Sprint Open Developers Conference on Tuesday, there was but one word on their lips: Android.

While talk in the past has focused on Windows Mobile or Palm, the biggest topic of conversation at the ninth annual conference in Santa Clara was Google's 1-year-old smart phone operating system, which has become the darling of the mobile development world.