sprint

Sprint Nextel and Verizon Communications both see an opportunity to make a buck on their IP telephony patents after successfully suing Vonage Holdings last year.

On Thursday, Sprint Nextel said in a U.S. District Court in Wichita, Kan., that it was suing four small phone companies. Sprint alleges that Nuvox Communication, BroadVOX Holdings, Big River Telephone, and Paetec Communications are infringing on six of its patents.

Those patents, part of a larger portfolio of patents that cover voice over IP technology owned by Sprint, are the same ones used to successfully sue Vonage. The two companies eventually settled the … Read more

Sprint Nextel is looking for replacements at the top of its corporate food chain.

On Thursday, the beleaguered wireless carrier said that three of its top execs, including Chief Financial Officer Paul Saleh, are leaving the company effective Friday. The company named Senior Vice President and Controller William Arendt as the interim CFO, while it searches for a permanent replacement.

Tim Kelly, chief marketing officer, and Mark Angelino, president of sales and distribution, are also stepping down.

Sprint has been in the process of reshaping its executive team for the past few months. Chief Executive Officer Gary Forsee was the … Read more

Sorry--I'm a couple days late with this, but I was a bit distracted by Macworld yesterday. Yes, there are other cell phones than the iPhone, and Moto gave us a new one yesterday with the i570 for Sprint Nextel. Like the recent i335 the i570 takes after the Nextel-branded phones of a couple years ago by running only on the iDEN network and offering a rugged shell that's built to last. The flip-phone offers a monochrome external display, a color internal display and all the Nextel features you'd expect including Direct Connect push-to-talk support, voice dialing, a … Read more

Sprint Nextel is preparing to cut thousands of jobs, according to the The Wall Street Journal.

The company's new CEO, Dan Hesse, is supposedly trying to show investors that he is serious about cutting costs, the newspaper's Web site reported late on Monday. A Sprint representative declined to comment on the story.

Exactly how many people could lose their jobs is not yet known. Last year the company cut about 5,000 jobs. At the end of the last quarter Sprint reported it had roughly 60,000 employees.

Sprint is the third-largest cell phone company in the U.… Read more

Hey ladies (and gentlemen, too, don't mean to discriminate), Sprint and Palm have just released a powder pink version of the Palm Centro smartphone if the current red and black models don't tickle your fancy. It's available starting today for the same bargain price of $99.99 with a two-year contract and after rebates and discounts, and has all the features of the original release, including Palm OS 5.4.9, EV-DO, and Bluetooth. For those of you who don't know, the Centro is Palm's smallest and lightest smartphone and really takes aim at the … Read more

Catching Verizon Wireless and Sprint off-guard, Research in Motion showed off some upcoming colored models of the RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8130 for the respective carriers at CES 2008. The red version will go to Verizon, joining the silver Pearl 8130, while the powder-pink model will land at Sprint along with the purple Pearl. No specific release dates were given, but I'd guess the launch dates aren't too far away--February at the latest.

With a mandate to "improve execution across the board," wireless carrier Sprint Nextel named industry veteran Dan Hesse as its president and CEO.

Hesse is a former AT&T Wireless executive and was head of Embarq, the telephone division Sprint spun off in May last year, so he knows his way around the telecommunications business, but his new job nonetheless comes with considerable pressure.

The company's search for a new chief executive began in early October, when the Sprint board pushed out chairman and CEO Gary Forsee and tapped Chief Financial Officer Paul Saleh to become acting CEO. … Read more