Cricket Reveals Galaxy S 4, Future Smartphone Plans

LAS VEGAS?Cricket is moving on up. At the CTIA Wireless trade show this week, the nation's No. 5 carrier outlined an ambitious plan to stock more high-end smartphones supporting nationwide LTE, most notably including the Samsung Galaxy S 4.

"A year ago, we had less than 1 percent of our customers on high-tier handsets," Cricket CEO Doug Hutchinson said. "Now we're in the mid-teens on the high-tier handsets and growing nicely."

Cricket is backing up these plans with an aggressive new ad campaign targeting AT&T and Verizon subscribers called "Half is More," highlighting how its $50 plans cost half what most AT&T and Verizon subscribers are paying. This is a nuanced strategy for Cricket, which is much cheaper than the two big players but tends to be a little more expensive than the truly low-cost prepaid carriers.

I spent a little time with the new Cricket Galaxy S 4 and the less expensive Samsung Galaxy Discover at Cricket's press conference. They're both pretty much as expected; Cricket's major addition is its unlimited Muve Music service. The Galaxy S 4 will cost $599 up front, but Cricket will also offer a range of financing options.

Cricket's unafraid to offer high-end, high-cost smartphones after seeing the success of its Galaxy S III this year, said Matt Stoiber, Cricket's senior vice president for devices.

"Our expectation was that our customers probably wouldn't spend that much money to get to an iconic phone, but we were surprised with the take rate on the Galaxy S III," he said.

A More Focused Portfolio

Cricket's 2013 portfolio will focus primarily on smartphones, with Samsung playing a heavy role. Stoiber said Cricket will carry two entry-level feature phones, a clamshell, and a QWERTY device, along with a bunch of entry-level smartphones and some high-end smartphones. About a third of Cricket's customers are still on feature phones, and mid-tier smartphone customers have been moving up to high-end devices with the coming of Cricket's device financing plans, he said. But you shouldn't expect a huge lineup from a carrier with seven million customers.

"You're not going to see us go to 18-24 devices in the lineup again. We're going to be trying to be very smart about which devices we pick, and you'll see a much narrower focus on OEMs," he said.

That seems to be a signal that Cricket won't be aggressively auditioning new Chinese manufacturers and instead is going to be primarily working with bigger brands like Samsung, LG, and HTC.

LTE will also be a major focus. Cricket only covers a third of the country by itself, but it also has an ongoing wholesale agreement with Sprint offering Cricket customers nationwide roaming on Sprint's 3G and LTE networks. The new Cricket GS 4 will support LTE on both Cricket's AWS and Sprint's 1900Mhz networks, and some 2014 devices may mix in Clearwire's 2.5Ghz as well.

"You'll see fewer 3G options for our customers," Stoiber said. "You're not going to see a lot of new 3G Android devices. We're working hard to get 4G to entry level pricing."

And while Cricket is focused on its iPhones and Android devices right now, it isn't counting out other mobile operating systems.

"We're likely to have [a Windows Phone 8] in the future," Stoiber said. "We're very interested in it, and it wouldn't be an entry level device ? we continue to talk to BlackBerry, but we haven't made any commitments to BlackBerry," he said.

Source: http://feeds.ziffdavis.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/breakingnews/~3/LDa8ZMbjXEw/0,2817,2419377,00.asp

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