CTIA: 250K Unlocked iPhones; Survey Results

The iPhone is staying the news with the admission by Apple Inc. this week that as many as a quarter million of the 1.4 million devices sold through September were bought but not authenticated on the AT&T Inc. network. The assumption is that these phones were purchased, unlocked, then sent overseas. Nonetheless, AT&T said that about 14 percent of its revenue gains were due to wireless subscriptions during its earnings call.

Unlocked or not, love for the iPhone continues, according to Compete Inc., a Web analytics company. It released a study at CTIA on the iPhone’s impact on the consumer market, revealing that the holiday season should be a good one, with 20 percent of people considering buying an iPhone would buy one as a gift. And iPhone shoppers know what they want — only 7 percent of them researched other smartphones. Compete said there’s no evidence that the iPhone buzz has increased overall demand for AT&T handsets.

There were 415,000 online iPhone shoppers on launch day, which is more than the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii had combined, and the equivalent of one week of CNET.com traffic, Compete also revealed. The majority of users are interested in the iPhone for lifestyle use rather than for work, with the top four most sought-after features being Internet access (68 percent), personal e-mail access (64 percent), multimedia messaging (53 percent) and Wi-Fi (53 percent).

Apple Inc. www.apple.com
Compete Inc. www.compete.com

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