Ina Fried

Apple’s $3 billion purchase of Beats Music and Beats Electronics has been completed. Apple has notified roughly 200 Beats workers that their positions at Apple will only be temporary, while the remainder will join Apple permanently.

AT&T grabbed a lot of attention back in January when it announced plans to offer companies the option to pay for data used by their customers. Since then? Crickets.

Speculation that Amazon might be the first big-name customer for the service for the Fire phone proved to be premature. However, AT&T has been gradually adding a few smaller names to the pilot program launched earlier in 2014. So-called sponsored data is designed to work like a toll-free number did in the landline days.

In this case, the sponsor foots the bill for the consumer to use certain services without having the resulting data use count against his or her monthly limit. Seattle-area startup Syntonic Wireless is announcing that it is now a part of the AT&T effort and plans to launch a sponsored content marketplace that will allow smartphone owners to see a range of available content that won’t count against their monthly data cap.

AT&T said that it is selling its stake in America Móvil, the large Latin American cell phone company and parent of US prepaid brand Tracfone.

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, the primary owner of America Móvil, will pay nearly $5.6 billion for AT&T’s stake, according to a regulatory filing.

“When we announced the DirecTV deal, we said that we would sell our stake in (America Movil) to facilitate the regulatory approval process in Latin America,” AT&T said.

AT&T has been pretty quiet about its plans for “toll-free” data service since announcing its plans at CES in January. With sponsored data, companies foot the bill for certain kinds of data use, meaning it is free for consumers.

AT&T said at the time that it was testing the service with a handful of partners, but has gone radio silent since then. That could change if, as some suspect, Amazon chooses to subsidize some of their customers’ data usage on the smartphone it is introducing.

Amazon could offer its sponsored data as part of its Amazon Prime service, which recently got a $20-per-year price hike in order to cover some of the rising costs with the service. Amazon added a Prime music service that offers subscribers unlimited streaming (though the service lacks most recent releases and has a smaller catalog than other music services).

In the last nine months, some 28 million US customers opted to pay one of the major carriers full price for a smartphone rather than sign up for a two-year contract to get a discounted model, according to a new study.

Of those customers, an estimated eight million switched carriers to get one of the new-style plans, with the lion’s share of the switchers (5.1 million) of those going to T-Mobile, according to research being released later by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Typically, such purchase options come with lower-cost monthly service, the option to upgrade sooner or both. T-Mobile has shifted entirely to such plans, while AT&T offers no-subsidy options with its Next and Mobile Share Value programs and Verizon has its Edge program. Even where customers have a choice to get a subsidized phone, the financing programs appear to be gaining steam.

[Commentary] Once again, T-Mobile is boasting about how its wireless growth outpaced the rest of the industry combined.

And rarely does a week go by without CEO John Legere touting all of the many ways that his un-carrier is shaking things up. But the question now is whether those market share gains -- and all that bluster -- will actually make it harder for T-Mobile and Sprint to complete a merger that many say the companies need to become a long-term competitor to Verizon and AT&T.

“The answer is 100 percent yes,” said wireless industry analyst Chetan Sharma. “It would have been easier to push through a deal if T-Mobile was weaker than it is today. In an ironic twist of fate, the recent success of T-Mobile has worked against them.”

T-Mobile is trying to walk a fine line as it touts the gains it is making as an independent company while still arguing that further consolidation would benefit consumers.

T-Mobile Chief Financial Officer Braxton Carter and marketing chief Mike Sievert said that a potential combination with Sprint or another entity would allow the company to take its “un-carrier” approach to more consumers.

“We believe this is a scale industry,” Sievert said. “It would allow a disruptive player to become even more disruptive.”

Carter said it would be kind of like putting the un-carrier “on steroids.” Regulators in Washington, though, seem opposed to a Sprint-T-Mobile deal, although Sprint and SoftBank have been making the rounds in DC trying to put forward their case for why it could be a good thing.

The jury weighing the Apple-Samsung patent case heard more than 50 hours of testimony, but still has some questions they wish had been answered.

In a series of notes to the court, the deliberating jurors asked for more details on how Apple and Samsung chose the patents they sued over in this case, as well as what Steve Jobs said when Apple first decided to pursue its patent case against Samsung and whether Google was mentioned. They also asked what Samsung’s reaction was when it learned Apple believed it was infringing.

The jury is still out on the latest Apple-Samsung patent trial, but Samsung has already won the larger battle.

When the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Samsung’s US smartphone market share was about 10 percent. By mid-2010 it had dropped to about half that level. By 2013, Samsung had more than rebounded, nabbing nearly a third of the US market in some quarters.

For all Apple’s legal victories, including a roughly $1 billion verdict in the last patent trial, Samsung has continued to grow its share of the smartphone market, both in the US and globally.

Apple has twisted Samsung’s words to make it appear that it was looking to copy the iPhone, but that wasn’t the case, lawyers for the Korean electronics giant argued in closing statements in the companies’ patent infringement case.

The iPhone, Samsung argues, doesn’t even employ at least three of the specific patents for which infringement is claimed in the case.

“You can’t copy if it’s not there,” said Samsung attorney Bill Price, one of four lawyers that will tag-team the company’s closing argument. In the case, Apple has accused a number of Samsung phones and tablets of infringing five patents and argued it is due more than $2 billion in damages.

The pursuit of that large amount is what prompts Apple to talk about copying and stealing, Price said. He also made the case that all Samsung did is what most other phone makers did -- start using Google’s Android to compete with the iPhone. “The Android platform is the world’s alternative to iOS,” Price said.