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Technology Stocks : The New Qualcomm - a S&P500 company -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Valueman who wrote (1237)	9/2/1999 8:48:00 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 13582

Vman, I suppose Telstra ordered the ThinPhone 6 months ago. Those who are slow in ordering are at the back of the queue. Telstra presumably figured out that they would need handsets since they were installing cdmaOne networks all over Australia. So they checked out what was available and signed some contracts. Sprint and PrimeCo must have been asleep at the wheel. Maybe they thought they'd wait and see how it went and then they'd order some. Well, guess what happens with that approach. Does this all sound familiar? Let's think Globalstar. A $$multibillion system up in space with gateways spread all over the world. Pretty soon, Airtouch and the other service providers will figure out that they actually need handsets and a lot of them. 10,000 here and 20,000 there is out by an order of magnitude. They should be ordering 200,000 here and 300,000 there! They know how much they have to pay for the wholesale minutes, so without too much of a struggle, they should be able to figure out that they'll need a LOT of handsets [6 million to be precise] to maximize their profits. Maybe they figure that by taking their time ordering the handsets, they can leverage lower minute prices out of Globalstar. After all, the subscribers are going to pay a certain amount of money and the handset maker, service provider and Globalstar have to negotiate a three way split of that amount. If the minutes are too cheap, the handset maker will get too much. If the wholesale minutes are too cheap, the service provider will get too much. If the handsets or service provider cut is too cheap, Globalstar would look greedy. Globalstar was one too smart for them though and ordered a bunch of handsets themselves. So now Globalstar has handsets available for service providers who want to actually sell some minutes. If one doesn't want them, maybe another will. Good move by Globalstar. Maybe Globalstar should order another million handsets from Qualcomm then sell them on to the highest bidder. It would be like Telstra with the ThinPhone. Sprint missed out and Telstra is having fun. That's only $1bn and Qualcomm has $1bn to finance it! Life's easy in the CDMA world. Heck, Qualcomm could just go ahead and start producing, knowing that the service providers will be competing for handsets so all the handsets will sell. Mqurice

To: Valueman who wrote (1237)	9/2/1999 11:08:00 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13582

Well at least Sprint finally has the Thinphone....just got back from my trip to buy a brand spanking new QCP-1960. Some observations.... 1) The Sprint rep said they had just come in two days ago. They didnt have ANY accessories for the phone. Also the phone was only available in granite and some shade of blue. No Black!!!! 2) Indicated that Sprint would be turning on their data service on Sep. 15th. The only two phones available that can take advantage of this feature are the Denso Touchpoint and the Thinphone. Others will be able to after getting a software upgrade (Nokia 6185) 3) The Nokia 6185 has been out of stock. They have had trouble getting inventory from Nokia. They havent had any problems with returns due to RF etc....it has been their most asked about phone. 4) Supposedly they were expecing the Neopoint1000 in the last week or so. The story was that they were delayed due to "network" problems and werent sure when they were going to get them in..... Just some observations from a single PCS store in the suburbs of chicago.... Slacker