AT&T cannot keep its mouth shut

You’ll have to pardon the AT&T executives—they’re just too damn excited about this new version of the iPhone they’ve heard so much about. CFO spoke at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit yesterday, and had this to say about the presumably forthcoming new iPhone model:

Lindner said AT&T has yet to determine pricing for a hotly anticipated new version of Apple Inc’s media-playing iPhone. “There’s not been a product announcement. There hasn’t been any pricing decision made. That’s yet to come,” he said. […] Lindner said he has seen a picture of the next iPhone, but not the actual device.

*Boggle*: what part of “secret product launches” does this guy not get? Over at the mothership, the good Philip Michaels recently opined on the joys of working with AT&T, so let’s just add this one to the wireless provider’s tab. You know, it occurs to me that maybe the reason Apple hasn’t sued the pin-striped trousers off of clone-maker Psystar is because they’re currently dedicating all their lawyers to figuring out how to get the hell out of this exclusive AT&T contract.

Lindner did at least have some interesting non-taboo things to say about the iPhone.

Lindner said AT&T has more than 2.5 million iPhone customers, with the average subscriber spending nearly $100 a month on services after shelling out as much as $500 for the phone itself.

Huh. I’m not sure if that subscriber figure is current, but it is surprisingly close to AT&T’s year-end figures for 2007, at which point they said they had 2 million iPhone subscribers (which, as you may recall, tipped off the mystery of the missing iPhones).

Meanwhile, Apple sold about 1.7 million iPhones in the second quarter—if only 500,000 of those were activated on AT&T, then the unlocking rates are pretty high. AT&T didn’t break out iPhone subscribers in its recent quarterly results.

On the other hand, maybe Lindner was just using the most recently available public figures and I’m just rumormongering. Hey, it’s Friday before a long weekend: what’re you going to do?

Category: AT&T, News

Posted by Dan Moren on May 23 2008, 10:26 AM ET

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