Why Carriers Still Hold the Key to Handset Sales

Mobile network operators may be seeing their long-held dominance in the space fade as newcomers like Apple and Google expand in the mobile sector, but when it comes to selling handsets, carriers still hold the key. And no operator is better at hawking handsets than Verizon Wireless. Its $100 million ad campaign for the Motorola Droid launch was an unqualified success, fueling Droid sales that outpaced the Nexus One by a factor of nine in its first 74 days on the market. Also, Verizon's aggressive "buy one, get one" promotion played a huge role in the success of RIM's BlackBerry Curve, which made headlines last year by outselling the iPhone in the first quarter of 2009.