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T-Mobile has announced Sept. 22 that industry veteran John Legere will fill its open CEO. Interim-CEO Jim Alling plans to return to his role of chief operating officer.

Legere, 54, is a marathon runner and the former CEO of Global Crossing, a worldwide Internet services provider. Under his direction, said T-Mobile, Global Crossing "completed the world’s first integrated global IP-based network, achieved near-perfect network operations and significantly improved customer satisfaction."

Before Global Crossing, Legere was CEO of a joint venture with Microsoft, a senior vice president at Dell and a senior executive at AT&T, where his roles included President of AT&T Asia.

"As T-Mobile moves forward with its strategic initiatives to improve its market position, including expanding its network coverage and initiating LTE service, John has obviously the right skillset to lead the business into the future," said René Obermann, CEO of T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom.

T-Mobile’s last CEO, Philipp Humm, resigned June 27, with plans to return to his family in Europe (said T-Mobile) and oversee Northern and Central European coverage areas for Deutsche Telekom rival Vodafone.

Legere takes on the mantle as T-Mobile undergoes a considerable network upgrade that includes a rollout of Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, which will enable it to support the Apple iPhone. T-Mobile’s lack of an iPhone has contributed to its falling revenues and customer losses. Last week, it was the only top-four network left out of Apple’s iPhone 5 announcement.

Technology Business Research (TBR) analyst Eric Costa has forecast that several important factors will come together for T-Mobile in 2013, but not before then.

"T-Mobile is in the middle of a company-wide restructuring, including a new post strategy, new leadership and a network modernization project," Costa wrote in an Aug. 9 report. These, he said, "will not have time to positively influence the company’s results in [the second half of 2012]."

Its first-quarter 2013 deployment of LTE and its refarming of spectrum for use in its LTE deployments, however, should provide "sufficient network improvements that will help retain subscribers and slow revenue loss," said Costa.

The rather inevitable addition of an iPhone to the network will also help to boost T-Mobile’s data revenues, according to Costa. Though while competitors such as Sprint have used the iPhone to attract new subscribers, for T-Mobile the iPhone will help with the task of keeping current subscribers in place.

T-Mobile’s growth efforts were also slowed by the nine months of 2011 that it spent in limbo, as AT&T worked to persuade the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow it to purchase T-Mobile. T-Mobile executives testified before a Senate sub-committee that the carrier didn’t have the funds to roll out LTE and so wouldn’t be able to effectively compete in the current market.

Ultimately, it was the denial of the acquisition that enabled T-Mobile to begin its network refresh, as its contract with AT&T included a consolation prize of sorts—a portion of spectrum and nearly $4 billion—if the deal were to not go through. On Feb. 23, Humm announced T-Mobile’s plans to spend $4 billion on network upgrade that will include LTE, improvements to voice and data coverage, the pursuit of new business-to-business opportunities, the expansion of T-Mobile’s sales force, and new advertising investments.

Legere said in a statement that he is thrilled to join T-Mobile at "such a pivotal time." He added, "T-Mobile is taking a number of significant steps to revitalize the business and I look forward to leading our team and partners to accelerate these efforts to become a force in our industry."

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NEW YORK — HTC and Microsoft introduced the Windows Phone 8X
and 8S at a Sept. 19 event, marking the next phase in what the pair said was a
15-year relationship.

Exceptionally thin and featuring soft-to-the-touch
materials, the smartphones are wrapped in primary shades of red, yellow, blue
and black that bring to mind Nokia’s Windows Phone efforts.

"HTC built this hardware from the ground up to really showcase the Windows
Phone software," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the crowd. "It’s a
Hero product with incredible cameras and killer, killer sound."

HTC head of design Scott Croyle described the phones as
featuring "3D Gorilla Glass that wraps and flowers over all four
sides." The front camera, he added, is "more than an afterthought."
It can shoot 1080p HD video, while the rear camera features a f2.0 lens, so
"your photos will be great, even when the lighting isn’t."

HTC again leaned on its partnership with Beats Audio, bringing
the technology to Windows Phone for the first time.

The devices were spoken of in terms such as
"crisp," and "simple, crafted and human."

The 8X has a 4.3-inch SuperLCD 2 720p display, a 1.5GHz
processor, 16GB of storage, an 8-megapixel backside-illuminated camera, a
front-facing 2.1MP camera, a viewing angle of 88 degrees and a weight of 4.6
ounces. It also has two dedicated amplifiers, one for the headphone jack and
one for the speakers.

The smaller 8S has a 4-inch SuperLCD, a dual-core 1GHz
processor, a 5MP rear-facing camera, 4GB of internal storage, a microSD slot
for adding on, and a weight of 3.98 ounces.

The iPhone 5, to compare, weighs 3.95 ounces. 

While U.S. consumers are more likely to associate the brand
with Google’s Android platform, HTC CEO Peter Chou told the audience, "We
have sold more Windows Phones than anyone."

Chou, explaining the catalyst for the devices, said he met
with Ballmer to discuss how the two companies could go "bigger and better
than ever" and then told HTC’s designers, "We have to take a
completely fresh approach; we need a breakthrough!"

Here, investors might offer an "Amen!" As the
Google platform first gained popularity, HTC enjoyed success in the U.S. with
devices like the HTC Evo and Droid Incredible, but ultimately was unable to
compete against the Apple iPhone or out-Android Samsung’s Galaxy lineup. In
April, Chou announced that, given the difficulty of fighting for U.S.
consumers, HTC would focus more heavily on markets in Asia and Europe.

Earlier this month, Jason Mackenzie, HTC’s president of
sales and marketing, told Reuters that alongside its Android efforts HTC
planned to "go big on Windows 8."

At the New York event, Mackenzie said HTC and Microsoft plan
to bring these devices to market in "a big way," and that they will
"position the 8X and 8S as the signature Windows Phones." This might
come as not great news for Nokia, which likes to call itself Microsoft’s
biggest partner in Windows Phone.

Starting in November, the 8X and 8S will be available from
more than 150 wireless carriers in more than 50 countries. In the United
States, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless will offer them. Pricing wasn’t
announced.

"Beautiful design is at the heart of both the hardware
and the software," said Ballmer. "These phones are magically thin,
and [as Windows Phones] are the first phones to, from the inside out, put
people first."

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Maisto on Twitter.

In a gleeful Google+ post, Hugo Barra, director of product management for Google’s Android project, lauded the still-growing success of Android around the world.

"Today is a big day for Android … 500 million devices activated globally, and over 1.3 million added every single day," wrote Barra in a brief but pointed post Sept. 11 on his Google+ page.

What he didn’t note—and what he didn’t have to note—is that the milestone was being announced on the eve of Apple’s iPhone 5 launch Sept. 12.

That subtle dig at major rival Apple seems to be part of the very competitive landscape in the mobile device marketplace wars nowadays.

"Apple has been a great success," said analyst Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research. "Android, with all the [patent infringement] lawsuits that have been going on between them, wants to demonstrate that they have great momentum and that their product is very strong and sells well globally."

At the same time, she said, the market is still very young and undeveloped, which means that more shifts and changes are likely to occur. "The interesting thing is that we’re still in such early days of the market. Most people are still getting their first smartphones or people are upgrading to new ones. So this is by no means over."

That’s great for the market and for consumers, Lopez said.

"It’s good to have a healthy competition between the two," she said. "It keeps innovation moving forward in the market."

Wally Swain, an analyst with Yankee Group, said that the market wars between Apple and Android actually are different depending on where you are in the world.

"The numbers, the buzz is all toward iPhone now [due to the Sept. 12 iPhone 5 launch], and it is tremendously important for what future smartphones are going to be," Swain said. "But the bulk of the market globally is Android. The raw numbers are for Android, especially outside of the United States," in places like Asia and other regions where there is a huge Android bias.

Apple is certainly trying to counter the growth of Android with new innovations and devices such as the iPhone 5, but that could be tougher to do now since competitors are also bringing interesting new ideas into their devices and capturing the attention of consumers, according to analyst firm Ovum.

"Apple needs to do much more than the widely expected hardware revamp of the iPhone to lead in the smartphone market," Adam Leach, leader of Ovum’s Devices and Platforms practice, said in a statement. "[Ovum] expects that the new iPhone will be Apple’s most successful smartphone to-date. However, without a redesign of the iOS user experience and underlying software platform in the next two years, Apple will find itself in a position similar to Nokia and RIM, which found themselves with outdated smartphone platforms that needed replacing."

Apple can’t rely solely on customer brand loyalty to keep their smartphones as popular as they have been since the iPhones debuted in 2007, according to Leach. "Whilst the company is still reaping the rewards of the brand equity of the iPhone, consumers are notoriously fickle when it comes to buying handsets. Without the continued innovation which we are accustomed to with Apple, the company risks losing consumer appeal."

Whether the new iPhone 5 can help Apple continue its past success will soon be seen, he wrote. "The iPhone re-defined the smartphone category in 2007 but it can’t rely on past success to guarantee its future or rely on litigation to keep its competitors at bay.”    

The U.S. market for feature-rich smartphones is still expanding at a rapid clip, with two-thirds of new mobile phone buyers opting for devices that can do far more than their old-style flip phones, according to a study from Nielsen released in July. Google’s Android operating system is the beneficiary of this surge, although the iPhone still holds sway.

"Android continues to lead the smartphone market in the U.S., with a majority of smartphone owners (51.8 percent) using an Android OS handset," according to the Nielsen data. "Over a third (34.3 percent) of smartphone owners use an Apple iPhone, and BlackBerry owners represented another 8.1 percent of the smartphone market."  

Apple handsets have the highest manufacturer share of the U.S. smartphone market overall, Nielsen reported, but in June, about 54 percent of handset buyers chose an Android handset, compared with 36 percent who bought iPhones.

In May, an Ovum report projected that Android will dominate the smartphone market through 2017.

Ovum said it expects Android to hold 48 percent of the smartphone market by 2017, while growing at a slower pace than it has recently. In 2011, Android’s share jumped to 44 percent, up from 2010’s 17 percent. Apple is expected to control a 27 percent share in 2017, up from 2011’s 23 percent share, with remaining smartphone players following at a good distance.

The Galaxy Note II is Samsung’s "fifth iconic device in 12 months," Teri Daley, Samsung’s vice president of public relations recently told a roomful of U.S. journalists. It’s perhaps a bit of an overstatement, given that the device hasn’t yet shipped—it will head to Europe, Asia and the Middle East in October, and a version for the United States will arrive later this year. But given the success of the four devices that proceeded it, whether her words are hyperbole may be a matter of timing.

Samsung’s "year of innovation," as Ryan Bidan, Samsung Mobile USA’s director of product marketing, put it, began with the Galaxy S II smartphone, which "kicked off" the trend of smartphone displays growing to between 4.3 and 4.5 inches. Given that Apple’s iPhones, with their 3.5-inch displays had been a roomy-enough norm, suddenly consumers got a taste for more real estate.

Up next, by Bidan’s calendar, was the Samsung-made Google Nexus, which features a 4.65-inch display. "We’ve developed more with Google than anyone else and have more experience with developing new software the fastest," said Bidan.

The Nexus was followed by the original Galaxy Note, a device often referred to as a "phablet," since its 5.3-inch display made it seem as much a tablet as a smartphone. A year earlier, Dell had little success moving a device the same size—analysts pointed out its lack of "pocketability."

Launching the Note was "very polarizing," said Daley. "That’s what happens when you introduce a new form factor." She added that consumers were encouraged to "take a 30 day challenge," and that after 15 days they were usually hooked.

In a matter of months, Samsung sold 10 million of the devices.

Next came the Galaxy S III, a large, slippery, sensor-packed smartphone stuffed with sharing capabilities, the ability to literally look a user in the eye and a 4.8-inch display. In 100 days, Samsung sold more than 20 million. 

Likely in time for holiday sales, the foursome will be joined by the Galaxy Note II. First introduced Aug. 29 at the IFA 2012 trade show in Berlin, the global version of the Note II features a 5.5-inch HD Super AMOLED display, a Samsung Exynos 1.6GHz quad-core processor and will run the Jelly Bean version of Android (version 4.1) when it ships. 

Samsung shrank the bezel around the display, so while it offers two more inches of screen, it’s thinner and doesn’t feel drastically larger—it measures 151 by 80.5 by 9.4 mm to the original Note’s 147 by 83 by 9.65mm. And while the battery has increased by 25 percent, the weight has held steady at 6.3 grams.

The tricky Pebble Blue of the Galaxy S III has been replaced by a Titanium Gray, and there will again be the option of Marble White.

The Note II will be optimized for Long Term Evolution (LTE) 4G technology and Samsung has upgrade a number of aspects, from improving the physical S Pen—which is now longer and thicker—to what it’s capable of. An AirView feature enables users to hover over the display for more information, without clicking on anything. When a video is playing, for example, a user can hover the S Pen over the timeline on the bottom and see upcoming footage. In an album of videos, hovering the S Pen over the thumbnails offers a condensed look at the footage that awaits.

Samsung has entirely changed the way photos are handled—including the ability to take better group photos and view image libraries in a spiral instead of just a grid—and there are new S Note capabilities.

"We’re committed to this form factor," said Daley. "You’re going to see amazing upgrades to this device."

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Apple’s smaller iPad will most certainly, almost definitely be called the "iPad Mini," Japanese tech site Macotakara reported Aug. 28, keeping the rumor mill turning with its confirmation of a name for a device Apple has yet to acknowledge it’s developing.

Macotakara’s news, which it says is based on sources in Asia, comes after months of the industry already referring to the tablet as the iPad Mini. The device is expected to feature a 7.85-inch XGA display and likely is already in production. The Wall Street Journal reported July 5 that component suppliers had been alerted to ready themselves for "mass production of the smaller tablet."

What is new is Macotakara’s report that there is a "mysterious hole" beside the iSight camera. The hole is similar to the WiFi antenna on the 3rd-generation iPod Touch, says the site, and is "covered by front glass."

Could this be infrared burst technology, like Samsung included in the Galaxy Note 10.1? The technology enables the newest Note to be paired with an HDTV (hopefully one made by Samsung, executives half-joked at the Note 10.1′s launch event) and used as a universal remote. Analysts expect Apple to release a television either later this year or in early 2013, and certainly it will want to link its newest products as much as is possible.

Still more "confirmation" of Apple news comes from All Things D, which has reported that Apple will hold separate press events to introduce the iPad Mini and its newest iPhone. While it has been widely rumored that Apple will introduce the iPhone 5 (another unconfirmed device name) Sept. 12 and begin shipping the smartphone Sept. 21, All Things D’s sources point to an October timeframe for the iPad Mini’s introduction.

Such a plan makes good sense. As John Gruber on the Daring Fireball has suggested, it can’t possibly benefit Apple to dilute a news announcement that’s been a year in the making. And indeed, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek earlier this month forecast that the iPhone 5 will bring about "the biggest handset launch in history."

Misek, also addressing the dilution issue in his Aug. 17 research note, wrote that an Apple TV will likely be ready to ship during the fourth quarter, but "we do not know how many major product announcements Apple would want to cram into Sept./Oct./Nov. and see a [first-quarter 2013] launch as possible."

Among the rumors, a Sept. 12 iPhone 5 introduction seems the likeliest. If Apple’s competitors aren’t privy to its timetables through manufacturing channels, then they’ve also bought into the mid-September timeframe, and a number of them have scheduled events—and likely device launches—for earlier in the month.

Nokia has invited some members of the press to a Sept. 5 event, where it will almost certainly introduce its newest smartphone (or smartphones) running Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8. Motorola also has a New York-based event planned for that day, while Amazon plans to make news in Los Angeles Sept. 6.

Let the wishing and ogling and spending begin.

Follow Michelle Maisto on Twitter.

Apple is expected to introduce the iPhone 5 Sept. 12—after which it’s going to be no easy feat for its competitors to grab a headline or pull attention away from the smartphone that Apple fans have been waiting for since essentially last October.

Because of this, you can expect a whole lot of news to be crammed into the week before.

Nokia has an event planned for Sept. 5, during which it’s expected to introduce its first phone, or phones, running Windows Phone 8.

Nokia could use a bit of spotlight, certainly—while to its credit it did increase smartphone sales between the first and second quarters, Gartner recently described Nokia’s Lumia devices as continuing to "struggle to find a place in consumers’ minds as a replacement for Android." However, it’s not likely to have that spotlight to itself for very long.

Later that same day, Motorola has an event planned, also in New York City.

The next day, Sept. 6, Amazon has invited some members of the press to an event in the Los Angeles area. The easy guess is a new Kindle Fire—the tablet that, ahem, blazed onto the scene last December and line-hopped everyone to grab the number-two market share ranking behind Apple.

The next quarter was a much different story.

In response to its dramatic market-share fall, Amazon has a new Fire in the works, IDC Research Director Tom Mainelli said in a May report, adding, "We expect a new, larger-screened device from Amazon at a typically aggressive price point, and Google will enter the market with an inexpensive, co-branded ASUS tablet designed to compete directly on price with Amazon’s Kindle Fire." Since he got the second part of that right, there’s no reason to think the first prediction won’t also hit.

Another guess is that Amazon will show off a smartphone. The Wall Street Journal reported July 11 that Amazon’s parts suppliers in Asia said the company is "testing a smartphone and mass production of the new device may start late this year or in early next year."

If sales of the Samsung Galaxy S III, which features a 4.8-inch display, are any measure of consumer tastes—and they should be; Samsung sold more than 10 million of them in a matter of months—people like a big display. Amazon is hip to this, surely, and the phone being tested, said the Journal, features a display that measures "between four and five inches."

At least one other manufacturer also has an event planned for that day, though it’s asked those invited to remain mum about the details. Or rather, about the invitation—the details are anyone’s guess.  

Apple, which has contributed to the busy week that will follow the Labor Day weekend, may have the last laugh. Sept. 12 is a reported date, speculated by analysts and the media. Apple has yet to send out invitations to its event. Most likely, it will wait to do this until Sept. 5 or 6, and manage to make competitors fight for headlines after all.

Follow Michelle Maisto on Twitter.  

The Apple iPhone 5′s physique and features have been thoroughly speculated about, but it’s the device’s chipset that could create a major change for the California device maker.

The iPhone’s incompatibility with Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA), a popular wireless standard unique to China, is for now preventing Apple from attaining greater market share in the world’s largest smartphone market, according to a Aug. 23 from IHS.

"Among all the international smartphone brands competing in China, Apple is the only one not offering a product that complies with the domestic TD-SCDMA air standard,” Kevin Wang, director of China electronics research at IHS, said in an Aug. 23 statement. “For Apple, this is a huge disadvantage, as TD-SCDMA represents the fastest-growing major air standard for smartphones in China, with shipments of compliant phones expected to rise by a factor of 10 from 2011 to 2016.”

Approximately 160 million smartphones are expected to ship to Chinese consumers by the end of this year—28 million of which will use TD-SCDMA—increasing 141 percent from 67 million in 2011. By 2016, smartphone shipments to the country could reach 333 million, according to IHS data.

Of the smartphones that shipped to China from January through June, the majority—20.8 percent—were made by Samsung, which likewise now dominates the U.S. market and overall phone market.

Lenovo was the second-most-popular brand, with an 11 percent market share; followed by Coolpad, a domestic brand, with 10.4 percent; Huawei, with 9.8 percent; and Nokia, with a 9.1 percent share.

Sixth place went to ZTE, with its 8.4 percent share, and behind it came Apple, with a 7.5 percent slice. While it’s a small-enough share to back IHS’ assertion that Apple isn’t doing all it can to compete, given the scale of the Chinese market, it’s still enough to make China Apple’s second-most-lucrative market.

During Apple’s July 24 earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that greater China represented two-thirds of Apple’s revenue in the Asia-Pacific region during its fiscal third quarter. Those two-thirds represented $5.7 billion, which was down from $7.9 billion the quarter before, due to "changes in the channel inventory, not the underlying sell-through of the iPhone," said Cook.

Cook added, "In terms of iPhones in general in mainland China, we were incredibly pleased with our results. We were up over 100 percent year-over-year. And as you probably know, just last Friday … we launched our new iPad in China after we resolved the iPad trademark issue."

The IHS report also points out that Apple is distancing itself from consumers by not offering a less-expensive iPhone option. Apple’s lack of a $99 iPhone, and Samsung’s delight to fill that hole, "helped Samsung to reclaim its leading worldwide position in the global smartphone market, six months after losing the top spot to Apple," said the report.

Low end isn’t Apple’s game, and IHS acknowledges this. But that "doesn’t change the fact," said Francis Sideco, an IHS senior principal analyst, "that Apple will need to find a way to access a larger portion of the Chinese smartphone market."

The Apple team seems to have decided that their strategy for this will be to keep doing what they do.

During the earnings call, an analyst noted that a good majority of the smartphones being purchased in "China and other emerging countries" are under $300, and in many cases under $200."

Cook responded, "I’m very pleased that we were able to grow our iPhone sales over 100 percent last quarter. So, yes, I feel very, very good about that … so we’re going to stick to our knitting and make the best products, and we think that if we do that, we’ve got a very, very good business ahead of us. So that’s what we’re doing."

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Motorola has filed a second patent infringement complaint against Apple, just one month
after an initial complaint filing that theoretically could result in Apple
iPads, iPhones and other products being banned from importation into the U.S.

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) released details Aug. 20 of the
second complaint by Motorola Mobility, now a Google unit, against Apple, which
was filed with the ITC on Aug. 17. It lists seven patents held by Motorola that
it alleges Apple has infringed upon in products such as the iPad, the iPhone
and various Mac computers including the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.

One of the patents describes technology “that allows an audible user input to be
converted into a text string," which would appear to describe Siri, the voice-activated
personal assistant feature introduced with the Apple iPhone 4S.

Besides Siri, other Motorola patents at issue deliver such features as location reminders, phone and video player functions and
email notifications. Motorola said in a prepared statement that it filed the
second complaint because Apple has been uncooperative in negotiations aimed at
licensing Motorola’s patents to Apple to settle the matter.

“We would like to settle these patent matters, but Apple’s
unwillingness to work out a license leaves us little choice but to defend
ourselves and our engineers’ innovations,” the company stated.

The Motorola vs. Apple case is one of a number of lawsuits that mobile
technology companies are filing against each other. A jury in San Jose, Calif.,
is scheduled to begin
deliberations Aug. 22 in a case in which Apple is suing Samsung for allegedly
violating several of its patents in the design of Samsung smartphones and
tablet computers. Apple vs. Samsung is considered by some to be a ”proxy case”
where Apple’s ultimate target is Google, which developed the Android mobile
operating systems that is a rival to Apple’s iOS platform and is used in
Samsung, Motorola and other brand name devices.

The latest filing comes about one month after the ITC ruled on infringement claims
by Motorola against Apple regarding seven other patents. The commission found
Apple to have violated one of those patents and is expected to rule on a
penalty for Apple on Aug. 24. The ITC could ban the import into the U.S. of any
Apple products manufactured in Asia that are found to have infringed Motorola’s
patents. However, one patent expert considers that unlikely.

The patent that the ITC found Apple to have infringed upon in July is a
“standard-essential" patent, which is basically a patent that has become
an industry standard, said Brian Love, an assistant professor of law at Santa
Clara (Calif.) University.