Allowing Android users of certain phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One and Torque devices, to more easily find Path could help the app win more users and improve distribution, which has been a continuing hurdle for CEO Dave Morin’s self-described closed personal network.

The company explained the partnership with Sprint in a statement:

“Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re starting something new with Sprint to make finding Path easy. Sprint has brought together a group of some of the highest quality apps around for its Discover-it Widget on the new Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One and Torque devices, and we’re delighted to be included. Now, millions of Sprint customers can download Path with just a quick tap, allowing them to easily connect and share with the ones they love.”

Path was dinged by users recently for reportedly spamming a user’s contacts telling people to sign up for Path. While Morin denied that Path had ever spammed its users, Facebook reportedly cut off access to the Facebook API that allowed users to invite their Facebook friends to join Path.

The Sprint partnership could give Path a needed boost in adding new members, as the pressure increases on the mobile social network. Sprint most recently counted 55.2 million customers, and while not all of them are using Android, it certainly provides Path with a large new group of possible users.

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Based on 2012 results, the combined company would have $24.8 billion of revenue and $2.7 billion of free cash flow. As of March of this year it has approximately 43 million subscribers. The deal terms were complicated including a 1 for 2 reverse stock split by MetroPCS, a cash payment of $1.5 billion to its MetroPCS stockholders and the proposed NewCo made up of T-Mo and MetroPCS acquiring all of T-Mobile’s capital stock from Deutsche Telekom in exchange for approximately 74 percent of MetroPCS’ common stock.

While the deal was approved by shareholders and regulators, the combined company still is trying to fight it out in a highly competitive and saturated mobile market. As my colleague Kevin Fitchard wrote when the deal was announced, this is a deal about beefing up T-Mobile’s spectrum so it can keep fighting Verizon and AT&T. Meanwhile Sprint, the nation’s third-largest carrier is in a deal of its own trying to buy Clearwire with cash provided by new partial owner Softbank.

It’s like a soap opera where everyone’s fighting for the airwaves. However, those fights are in the future, and today we just have to watch the stock and ponder what this means for the customer. Luckily, Fitchard already explained how this deal affects customers, so read that while you watch the stock.

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AT&T says you’ll get a minimum credit of $100 and if the phone is worth more, it will increase the credit accordingly. Once the smartphone is turned in and evaluated, customers can use the credit immediately in three ways: “towards an accessory purchase, apply it to an existing bill, or even donate it to AT&T’s charitable cause Cell Phones for Soldiers.” As long as the phone is no more than three years old and in good working condition, AT&T will accept it. (Maybe I’ll dig out my old Palm Pre!) According to an AT&T representative, it will even take phones from other carriers.

These deals reinforce that the cellular market is all about the services and ongoing revenue per user. Carriers generally don’t make money on hardware sales unless contract customers continue using their hardware after the contract period. T-Mobile is the exception to that rule, having branded itself the “uncarrier” and by separating the cost of hardware and services: Once you pay your hardware off with T-Mobile, your monthly bill is reduced to just the service plan.

I won’t say that AT&T just completely trumped Sprint’s $100 deal, but it’s likely going to take the wind of Sprint’s promotion. AT&T currently has LTE service in far more areas than Sprint. And even better — if you use AT&T’s network, that is — fallback service drops to HSPA+ which can be nearly as fast as LTE. Sprint’s fallback outside of LTE is EV-DO service, topping out around 1.5 Mbps.

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The official word from Sprint via email suggests that Samsung can’t deliver the required inventory in time:

“Sprint is excited to launch the new Samsung Galaxy 4.  We had planned to launch this next generation of the award-winning Samsung Galaxy line-up on Saturday, April 27. Unfortunately, due to unexpected inventory challenges from Samsung, we will be slightly delayed with our full product launch.  Sprint is one of Samsung’s largest partners and we are working closely with them to launch in all Sprint channels as soon as possible. We expect to make Galaxy S 4 available at www.sprint.com and Telesales (1-800-SPRINT1) as planned on Saturday with Sprint retail stores and other channels receiving devices as inventory becomes available.”

T-Mobile offered a similar statement, noting a five day delay at this time:

“We know customers are really looking forward to getting their new Samsung Galaxy S 4 soon. However, due to an unexpected delay with inventory deliveries, the Galaxy S 4 will not be available on www.T-Mobile.com as planned on Wednesday, April 24. Instead, online availability is expected to begin on Monday, April 29. We apologize for any inconvenience and are working with Samsung to deliver the device to T-Mobile customers as soon as possible.”

AT&T began taking pre-orders for the Android phone on April 16 and its website currently shows April 30 as the shipping date for Galaxy S 4 orders. I noticed that date did change over the past few days — I saw an April 24 ship date at one point —  but the carrier didn’t issue a formal statement on phone availability. Verizon has yet to announce launch details and is widely expected to do so by May.

The inventory delay of a few days won’t likely hurt the Galaxy S 4, which is competing in the Android space against the HTC One. That phone also experienced delays, which the company really didn’t need. HTC builds a great phone, but it lacks the marketing power and brand awareness that Samsung enjoys. As a result, it has watched its share of sales drop while Samsung has gone on to rival Apple.

Update at 8:56am PT: Per a tweet from Ken Muche, Verizon PR: Verizon Wireless is opening Galaxy S 4 pre-orders on April 25 for $199 with contract and after a $50 mail in rebate, but the phones won’t be in stores until May 30. Thanks to PhoneScoop for spotting the tweet.

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In a presentation explaining his bold vision for the company, DISH’s CEO Charlie Ergen detailed plans to provide seamless mobile access to subscription TV content (based around DISH’s Sling and Hopper technology), and a plan to offer fixed wireless broadband to the estimated 40 million households that lack access to high bandwidth fiber or cable networks. Crucially, the latter would be accomplished using a combination of Clearwire’s 2.5GHz spectrum as well as satellite broadband.

That’s the theory, but in practice commentators have questioned whether the leverage inherent in DISH’s bid – for what is a considerably larger company – will constrain the ability of a merged Sprint/DISH to invest in the Sprint network and implement these plans. Further, many expect that Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, will outbid Ergen – despite his protestations to the contrary.  Ergen’s vision for DISH’s future is bold and exciting, but the question ultimately is whether Sprint is crucial to achieving it, and whether it can even work without Clearwire.

Sprint not a requirement for mobile delivery

With respect to the delivery of seamless mobile video, DISH already has most of the necessary technology available. After all, you can already use Sling on your mobile device today. The only real constraint is that the cost of wireless capacity makes it prohibitively expensive to watch mobile video on a metered 4G data plan. If DISH does indeed acquire Sprint, then it could potentially exempt Sling content from any data caps implemented for Sprint subscribers, thereby making seamless usage more feasible (and an attractive marketing point for potential new subscribers).

Nonetheless, there is nothing unique about Sprint’s network that makes it a necessary component to that strategy: DISH could just as easily shop its AWS-4 spectrum to T-Mobile for instance, which could  deliver a similar offering.

Wireless broadband crucial for success

Unlike DISH’s mobile video plans, which are responding to potential longer-term shifts in video consumption, DISH’s ambitions to deliver fixed broadband to the home appear to be far more critical to the near-term competitive position of its satellite TV business. Importantly, the entire plan appears to be predicated on the use of Clearwire’s spectrum for a national deployment. In particular, DISH is at a substantial disadvantage compared to cable and telco TV solutions, which offer integrated broadband and video-on-demand capabilities.

DISH has been attempting to acquire around 40MHz of spectrum from Clearwire since last summer, and it is hard to see where else it could hope to dig up that much spectrum for a fixed wireless broadband network, at a reasonable price – unless DISH uses its own AWS-4 spectrum. However doing so would limit Ergen’s leverage to strike a deal with a wireless operator. Alternatively, DISH could attempt to repurpose LightSquared’s spectrum, but that would be fraught with difficulties.

The greater flexibility DISH has in realizing its mobile video plans vs its fixed broadband ones suggests it may be far more important for it to acquire some of Clearwire’s spectrum than to buy all of Sprint right now. After all, if Deutsche Telekom is willing to strike a deal with DISH after completing its merger with MetroPCS, then Ergen could deploy the 2.5GHz Clearwire spectrum on T-Mobile’s network.

So the question is, might SoftBank agree to sell part of Clearwire’s spectrum to DISH, in exchange for DISH agreeing to withdraw its bid for Sprint? That would certainly be logical, but with two billionaires’ egos at stake, it’s never a given that the most rational outcome will prevail.

Tim Farrar is president of Telecom, Media and Finance Associates, a consulting and research firm in Menlo Park, Calif., which specializes in technical and financial analysis across the satellite and telecom sectors.He blogs on wireless and satellite issues at tmfassociates.com; follow him on Twitter @TMFAssociates.

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T-Mobile customers can begin ordering their Galaxy S 4 for $149.99 down on April 24, followed by 24 interest-free payments of $20. The carrier eliminated phone subsides and contracts last month. Customers can now pair the $50, $60 or $70 Simple Choice monthly service with their Galaxy S 4. The benefit here is that once the Galaxy S 4 handset is paid off — a cost $629.99 — the $20 handset payments disappear from ongoing monthly bills. T-Mobile expects delivery of the Galaxy S 4 in retail stores on May 1.

Sprint is still subsidizing smartphones and is charging $249.99 for the Galaxy S 4 in either White Frost or Black Mist with a two-year agreement. Customers on other carriers, however, can save $100 by porting their number to Sprint and opening a new account. Sprint is opening pre-orders on April 18, with phones in Sprint stores on April 27. The carrier advertises unlimited data service for the Galaxy S 4.

The handset is LTE capable on Sprint’s network but if you’re not in a Sprint LTE coverage area, service will drop down to the carrier’s much slower 3G network. That’s a key difference from the Galaxy S 4 on AT&T or T-Mobile: when those handsets are used outside of an LTE zone, they’ll revert to HSPA+ service, which is typically 5 to 10 times faster than 3G.

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It’s not too difficult to believe the phone’s upcoming availability on AT&T, however; in fact, it reads like a planned leak to me, in order to build up more buzz for the new BlackBerry platform and phone.

When the new Z10 debuted in January, BlackBerry officials didn’t provide U.S. availability dates — that’s for the carriers to do — but offered expectations of a March time frame  Indeed, T-Mobile has said prior that it plans a mid-March launch. Verizon has yet to make any availability announcements while Sprint is passing on the Z10; it is opting for the Q10 handset with hardware keyboard.

Regardless of the exact launch dates, I’m keenly interested in how well the Z10 sells in the U.S. Currently available in Canada and a few overseas countries, there’s a bit of a debate on actual sales. Some analysts are reporting poor sell-through rates while others suggest sales are great. We have already seen some price cuts on the Z10 from one major U.K. outlet, which tells me there may be too much unsold inventory in certain areas.

Another reason U.S. sales are of interest: Apple’s iPhone and Google Android phones make up a massive 90.1 percent of smartphone ownership here. My usage of the Z10 didn’t show me reasons for many smartphone owners to switch away from the current incumbents, yet some reports indicate that 30 to 50 percent of sales are to “switchers.” That sounds high to me —  and is still unconfirmed — but perhaps U.S. sales of the Z10 to current iPhone and Android handset owners will prove me wrong.

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Juniper Research has just put out a report about mobile content business models and, according to the UK analyst firm, just 6 percent of content downloads now come from these portals, with the rest being attributable to third-party stores, chiefly Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play store. Frankly the 6 percent figure is surprisingly high – report author Windsor Holden told me the portals in question belong to “China Mobile and two or three others”, and even those are “going to wither away over the next few years”.

And the real money isn’t even in app sales, as Holden explained:

“Only a small proportion of apps are monetized at the point of sale. On the App Store it’s at the 10 percent mark, and it’s around 3 percent on Google Play. Where the apps are really making money is in terms of in-app payments and in-app billing. If you look at the highest-grossing apps… none of them are predicated on the pay-for-download model.”

In selling all those virtual swords and poker chips, the standard developer-OS vendor split is 70-30, meaning the carrier needs to try to wrangle some share out of that 30 percent cut. Is that just wishful thinking on the operators’ part? Not necessarily.

What carriers have to offer

According to Holden, there is still a problem that needs to be solved if even more money is going to be made out of mobile apps: in order to buy apps and make in-app purchases, the customer needs to register a bank card. And who doesn’t have one of those? Kids, and a heck of a lot of people in developing countries – in these segments, the ability to buy content with pre-paid phone credit makes a whole lot of sense.

“While operators have never been the best at direct content sales, there is a growing opportunity for operators to monetize their assets,” he said. “On a number of storefronts, including those for Nokia and BlackBerry, the conversion rates when you add carrier billing go up by a factor of 5 or 6 – there’s significant uplift on second or third purchases.”

In the U.S., customers of operators such as Sprint and Verizon can do this for Android apps, and Holden reckons around 15 percent of such transactions take place through carrier billing in that country. Globally, Juniper expects carrier billing-derived mobile content revenues to soar from $2 billion to $13 billion between now and 2017.

Of course, iOS is not part of this party, as Apple doesn’t share like that. However, Holden said, the flow of second-hand iOS devices into developing nations may eventually mean Cupertino is missing out on an opportunity — would it rather share revenues, or not make any?

Welcome evolution

This shift towards giving operators a slice of the pie is, in my opinion, a good thing – not because the operators deserve it by virtue of existing (a stance they’ve taken many times before), but because it rewards them for the use of assets that only they can provide.

We can see an analogy in the slow but steady emergence of carrier apps that exploit the good old mobile phone number. In that case, the operator’s asset is its ability to manage identity — my colleague Kevin Fitchard reported just the other day on an interesting new carrier initiative called OneAPI that shows how serious they are about expanding this role. In the case of app and content sales, the carrier can capitalize on the existing billing relationship it has with its customer — this makes the smartphone game more lucrative for the carrier while making life easier for the customer (see also: carriers getting a cut of Skype credit sales).

Recent years have involved so much struggle on the part of the operators against newer, more nimble players in the mobile value chain, but carriers are starting to find a comfortable and rewarding new position in that chain. In time, this evolution of their role may reshape the mobile ecosystem yet again.

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Raco is one of the players supplying the backend connectivity for the internet of things, linking everything from agricultural harvesters to ice machines to the cellular networks. While it’s worked exclusively with T-Mobile in the past, the deals expand its scope both to CDMA technologies and Telefónica’s extensive networks across Europe and Latin America.

According to Raco President John Horn, the two new deals, combined with a similar tie-up with U.K. operator Everything Everywhere, allow Raco to go after the internet of things on an international scale. For instance, Raco could now serve shipping companies wanting to track their vehicles or containers as they cross borders, or appliance makers that want to avoid signing connectivity deals with a separate carrier in every new country.

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This strategy differs from the other LTE carriers in the U.S.: virtual network operators buying wholesale airwaves from AT&T and Verizon typically don’t get access to the much faster LTE services. Sign up with any of the TracFone brands, for example, and you’ll only get to use 3G for your mobile web. Keeping LTE for contract customers only ensures a higher, longer-term revenue stream for AT&T and Verizon.

So why would Sprint diverge from the pack of contract carriers and offer LTE to its prepaid brand? Two reasons.

First, it can provide a small boost — no pun intended — to overall revenues by standing out from the prepaid crowd with LTE as an option. If few or no other prepaid brands offer LTE, Sprint stands to gain prepaid customers who value faster mobile broadband over voice minutes and text messages.

Second, and perhaps more important, Sprint quietly adds a second tier of service for its LTE customers. While Boost Mobile advertises unlimited web, the fair-use terms are actually a soft cap of 2.5 GB per month. That plan is $55 a month. Sprint customers that want truly unlimited LTE access can do so on the same network through Sprint directly, for $80 a month with a limited amount of voice minutes; unlimited everything adds another $30 per month.

The new LTE phones for Boost Mobile then, provide Sprint two ways to deliver LTE to its customers, regardless of whether they’re fine with contracts or prefer a month-to-month option. That could sway some to Sprint, which in turn starts recouping its LTE network investments a little faster.

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