Remember all the questions and concerns about how AT&T would cope after the iPhone became available at Verizon Wireless? Well, despite losing its exclusivity, AT&T Wednesday morning announced it activated 3.6 million iPhones during the first quarter of 2011 – a 33 percent jump from the same time in 2010. Compared to the last financial quarter in 2010, that 3.6 million iPhones is down slightly from 4.1 million.
But what about subscribers? Certainly, given the option, AT&T iPhone users would switch to Verizon, right? Not really. The carrier said 23 percent of its iPhone activations were from new subscribers. In other words, the vast majority of AT&T customers who owned an iPhone didn’t budge.
And this wave of tablets we’ve been reading about? Well, according to the carrier, demand was more like a wading pool – 322,000 tablets for the first quarter.
[Business Insider, All Things Digital]
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
