T-Mobile had a rough fourth quarter as it lost a total of 23,000 customers but its strong growth with smartphones and rollout of its HSPA+ 4G network are positive signs for the fourth-largest carrier.
T-Mobile is firmly in fourth place in terms of customers, as it has 33.73 million subscribers. Not all carrier losses are equal though, as losing prepaid users still stings but not as much as losing contract customers. T-Mobile lost 318,000 net contract customers for the quarter.
The carrier said that this was due to “revised credit standards and competitive intensity. FlexPaySM contract gross customer additions also decreased related to competitive intensity.” That’s not a great sign.
Of course, the carrier still managed to produce $4.69 billion in revenue for the quarter and it is seeing a steady growth of its smartphone lineup. Thanks to high-profile devices like the myTouch 4G, T-Mobile finished the quarter with 8.2 million smartphone users.
The carrier saw a net increase of 1$% or 1 million customers using smartphones from the previous quarter and this result was double the amount of smartphone users for the same quarter a year ago.
T-Mobile continues to roll out its 4G network, as its HSPA+ network now covers about 200 million people. It also recently introduced the Galaxy S 4G and this is the first smartphone in its arsenal which can get a theoretical 21 Mbps download speed. While that’s a theoretical speed, we’ve found that real-life speeds are about half of that and that’s still not too bad.
The company will be hopping into the tablet game with the upcoming release of the LG G Slate and the device sports the Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system and a camera that can record videos in 3D. There’s no word on the pricing or how much 4G access will be but we do think this could be a successful tablet.