U.S. Mobile Carriers Just Had Their Worst Quarter Ever

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Mobile Subscriber Growth In The U.S. Slows To A Standstill (Chetan Sharma)
Tech consulting firm Chetan Sharma just released a new report surveying the entire mobile market. One of the most interesting points was that U.S. mobile carriers only added 139,000 new subscribers last quarter, which amounts to their worst quarter is the history of the U.S. wireless industry. Read >

How Big Is Amazon's Kindle Business? (All Things Digital)
Amazon does not typically disclose all of its Kindle numbers, but Morgan Stanley claims Amazon will sell almost $4.5 billion in Kindle e-readers and tablets in 2013. On the digital content side, Morgan Stanley thinks Amazon will pull in another $3.8 billion in revenue this year. Read >

Amazon Coins: Real Money For Developers (Amazon)
Amazon disclosed some new data from their AppStore, with particular focus on the performance in the three months since the launch of Amazon Coins. After giving all U.S. Kindle Fire users 500 free Amazon Coins, those developers who monetized their apps for Amazon Coins saw their app revenue spike 50%. Read >

Magic Quadrant For Mobile Application Development Platforms (Gartner)
In a new report, Gartner surveys the state of the Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP) market. Because enterprise mobile application development continues to surge, demand for high quality MADPs has also shot up. Gartner assesses the top major vendors in the space, and ranks each in a quadrant of leaders, challengers, niche players, and visionaries. Read >

BlackBerry Is Now Where Motorola Once Was (Quartz)
BlackBerry is officially up for sale. Christopher Mims at Quartz believes rather than allow the hard-pressed handset maker to continue operating on its own in the mobile space, the team at BlackBerry should seek to be acquired by a company who can breathe new life into its operations, much like Google has done so with Motorola. Read >

Gap Will Take Over Tumblr For One Day (Mashable)
Gap will takeover all of Tumblr's mobile ads on August 29th in conjunction with its Back To Blue Tumblr contest and ad campaign. Tumblr's mobile user base is growing rapidly, and will likely overtake its desktop user base by 2014. In doing so, Gap is making Tumblr's mobile space a canvas for a full blown marketing campaign. Read >

ZTE To Sell Smartphone For $80 Through EBay (GigaOm)
ZTE will sell its new Open handset model through eBay for only $80. These phones are one of the first to run the Firefox OS. They are also unlocked, as the platform looks to capitalize on worldwide sales. Read >

The Smartphone Is Dead (Business Insider)
SAI's Steve Kovach comments on the inability of handset makers to distinguish themselves in the saturated top-tier smartphone market. It's a big reason why the next wave of smartphone growth is likely to come from lower-end models. Read >

Sony Just Turned Your Android Phone Into A Point-And-Shoot (The Verge)
Because of the saturation at the top of the market, high-end mobile accessories may become a lucrative market. Sony's newest high-end accessory, for example, is a snap-on, all-in-one camera lens that attaches to the back of an Android phone, making use of the phone's display as a viewfinder for the camera. Read >