T-Mobile blamed the postponement on “an unexpected delay with inventory deliveries,” while Sprint cited “unexpected inventory challenges from Samsung” in its own statement saying the rollout would be “slightly delayed.” Sprint still plans to start selling the phone online on April 27, which means it will beat T-Mobile in its online rollout, but its in-store debut will have to wait until inventory becomes available. T-Mobile is still planning to debut the device in stores on May 1.

The Galaxy S4 is supposed to be Samsung’s next iPhone competitor, but has so far been met with mostly tepid reviews. “Several of its advanced features don’t work very well, and it feels more like a collection of functions than a smoothly integrated experience,” said Bloomberg’s Rich Jaroslovsky in his review.

Not all reviews were so negative, but with supply chain concerns arising from the delay, the phone may be crippled right out of the gate. Samsung’s decision to debut the phone with the fourth-ranked U.S. carrier rather than the number-one or number-two carrier is also suspect. So far, the company has not commented on the delay.

The hiccup, whatever its cause, could result in AT&T having a leg up on the competition. While T-Mobile will have to delay the phone’s online availability by five days, AT&T somehow has an unexpected inventory allotment, which has allowed the carrier to begin its early pre-order deliveries, according to tech blog The Verge. AT&T has been telling early pre-order customers they may be receiving their devices as soon as April 25, though the carrier originally claimed it would ship out pre-orders by April 30 for a May 3 delivery.

AT&T will also be the first carrier to have the phone on sale in stores — tweeting on Sunday that the 16GB model will be available to purchase on April 27, the same day Sprint and T-Mobile are expected to have the device for sale online. No news yet on when Verizon will begin shipping the phone, but it plans to begin taking pre-orders tomorrow, ahead of its going on sale in retail stores on May 30.

T-Mobile might be losing some of its edge on this one, but the carrier isn’t all frowns, as it’s still got a few tricks of its sleeves. Firstly, its new pricing plan allows it to offer phones at an initial discount compared to other carriers. While competitors like Verizon and AT&T offer Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone for $199 with a two-year contract, T-Mobile offers the phone for just $99, with $20 payments each month until the phone is paid off in full.

While other carriers “subsidize” the cost of the iPhone, which means you’re not technically paying for the phone, they do charge higher rates and rope customers into two-year plans. Ultimately, by going contract-free and creating a payment plan for the iPhone, T-Mobile is able to charge significantly less for its monthly service plans. Ultimately, an iPhone user’s bill is cheaper, per month and for the two-year period, with T-Mobile than with any of the other carriers.

The iPhone may be T-Mobile’s most popular new addition, but this contract-free payment plan is being applied to all the carrier’s smartphone offerings. The Galaxy S4 will start at $149.99, with monthly, interest-free installments of $20 to be paid for 24 months. AT&T’s Galaxy S4 starts at $199, and comes with a costlier monthly service plan and a two-year contract.

Now, with the same popular phones as its competitors, and lower pricing, T-Mobile has the chance to steal away some customers. However, network size will certainly play a factor, as will reputation. It remains to be seen how much of a boost, if any, T-Mobile’s new strategy will give the carrier.

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P&G reported net income rose 6 percent in the third quarter, as the company cut costs and gained market share in North America. However, the company is facing a weakened European economy and a slowdown in China, and revenue fell short of analyst expectations.

“Strong cost savings enabled us to exceed our outlook on the bottom line,” CEO Bob McDonald said.

McDonald is aiming to save $10 billion by 2016, in a plan he announced in February 2012. After expanding too quickly in some emerging markets, the company is now focusing on its 20 biggest new products and its 10 most profitable emerging markets to try to gain market share.

And despite disappointing earnings results, the plan seems to be working — P&G has managed to hold or gain market share in categories representing more than 50 percent of its global sales and two-thirds of its U.S. sales amidst heightened competition from other household products suppliers like Colgate-Palmolive (NYSE:CL).

But while some products continue to thrive — particularly the company’s Tide laundry detergent brand, which saw boosted sales in the latest quarter with Tide Pods — others still need a push; namely, the company’s hair care and skin care business, which reported a decrease in net sales for the third quarter. P&G said it plans to promote several brands during the current quarter, including Olay skin care products.

P&G reported earnings of 99 cents per share on a core basis in the third quarter, topping analyst targets of 96 cents. Core earnings exclude items such as restructuring charges.

Sales were up 2 percent to $20.598 billion, but analysts were looking for sales of $20.73 billion, and the company had earlier forecast a sales bump of 3-4 percent. Organic sales, which don’t factor in the impact of divestitures and foreign changes, grew 3 percent.

On a net basis, the company earned $2.57 billion, or 88 cents per share, in the quarter ended in March, up from $2.41 billion, or 82 cents per share, in the year-earlier period.

P&G had forecast core earnings of 90-96 cents per share and net earnings of 80-88 cents per share.

P&G forecast fourth-quarter core earnings of 69-77 cents per share, while analysts were looking for 81 cents, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. P&G earned 82 cents per share in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012.

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On Monday, Panzarino, of tech news site The Next Web, tweeted the message “Fire Tim Cook!” Here’s where the irony comes in: Panzarino included a link in his tweet to a couple charts showing the steady upward momentum of Apple’s revenue and profit over the last few years, for most of which the company was led by none other than Tim Cook.

Panzarino’s comment, whether he meant it or not, is the perfect satire of bearish arguments against Apple and its leader. Apple shares have been tumbling ahead of earnings on rumors, among other concerns, that the company may have to push back the launch of the anticipated iPhone 5S from June to July, and the iPhone 6, which was originally slated for later this year, until 2014.

Apple watchers have a tendency to make mountains out of molehills, and can’t seem to see past them. Panzarino’s tweet and accompanying charts paint a pretty clear picture of this problem. Apple’s stock movements tend to be based entirely on rumors and expected catalysts, rather than company performance, and as a result, minor setbacks can result in major sell-offs. However, until recently, shares have tended to bounce back rather quickly. Now it seems the bears have gotten their footing, and Apple shares are trading at their lowest levels since 2011.

But that doesn’t mean the bears are right. Apple still has the most popular smartphone and the most popular tablet on the market — period. Global demographics may be shifting as emerging markets tend toward lower-cost smartphones, but Apple is unlikely to see any decline in overall sales figures. And according to a recent analysis, despite selling only a small fraction of the world’s PCs — about 5 percent — Apple rakes in roughly 45 percent of the industry’s profits, significantly more than any other PC manufacturer.

Since Cook officially became CEO in August 2011, the company’s annual revenue has grown 45 percent, to $156.51 billion, while profits have soared 61 percent, to $41.73 billion. And yet, shares rocketed to upwards of $700 in September 2012, only to slip back down to below $400 last week.

Of course, Apple’s sell-off isn’t completely unjustified — the company did warn Wall Street in January that it expected profits to decline about 20 percent during its fiscal second quarter, the results for which the company will report later today. The success of the iPad mini is also of some concern, as it’s cannibalizing sales of the full-size iPad, and carries a lower profit margin than its big brother. A perceived lull in new product launches also has some investors backtracking, thinking they were perhaps overly-enthusiastic about Apple’s prospects and ability to stay ahead of the pack with innovative new products.

However, Apple could easily turn things around with a successful product launch and the stronger quarterly earnings that tend to accompany successful launches. Whether investors will take the bait after being burned remains to be seen, but June will bring the Worldwide Developers’ Conference, where Apple tends to present exciting new technologies, and the iPhone 5S is expected some time soon, either June or July, depending on whether you believe recent supply chain rumors.

Despite what’s happening in the short-term, there’s no reason to believe it’s anything other than temporary. Apple still has the brand recognition and popularity that made it one of the most valuable companies in the world. And until Apple starts reporting declining sales over multiple quarters, there’s no reason to believe the strategy that has worked so well in the past won’t continue to do so.

One need only look at the Panzarino’s charts (below) to recognize that Apple’s revenue and profits don’t always increase from quarter to quarter. In fact, Apple’s best quarterly report ever, for the last three months of 2012, came following three depressed quarters in which revenue and profit were down significantly below those reported for the three months ending 2011.

Source: The Next Web

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The move is the latest in Twitter’s multimedia approach to increase the amount of time users spend on the site, which started out simply as a medium for sharing 140-character messages, or Tweets. Twitter released a video app in January, and now the new music app could be an even bigger draw, as record companies are likely to utilize it for promoting new tracks, drawing music lovers to the service.

Spotify and Rdio already let subscribers share songs and playlists through Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), which made Twitter’s next move pretty obvious. Social networks are becoming an increasingly important way for users to share music with friends, and as Facebook improves its music offerings — the company recently updated its news feed to make finding music easier — Twitter is getting on board with the trend, a must if it is to remain a viable Facebook competitor…

Twitter’s service, called #music, is available as of today, April 18, in the following markets: The U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the U.K.

According to Twitter’s blog announcement:

[#music] uses Twitter activity, including Tweets and engagement, to detect and surface the most popular tracks and emerging artists. It also brings artists music-related Twitter activity front and center: go to their profiles to see which music artists they follow and listen to songs by those artists. And, of course, you can tweet songs right from the app.

As an obvious marketing tool with a wide reach, #music should find widespread adoption rather quickly, especially if listening spurs sales. It can direct purchases straight to Apple’s iTunes, or any other partner site or program that sells music. This benefits the middle-men, so to speak, but also obviously the producers, artists, and everyone else involved in creating the music itself.

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In fact, Apple sells just 5 percent of the world’s PCs, but makes 45 percent of the industry’s profits. With low sales, Apple is being propped up by high margins, which most PC vendors just don’t have.

“The real problem for the PC vendors is not that they have such low margins — theyve had low margins for decades. Its that the volumes which made up for low margins are disappearing,” said analyst Horace Dediu.

Asymco compiled various data to give a broad but all-encompassing view of the PC market. Here’s some of what they found:

Apple isn’t shipping nearly the volumes of PC competitors like Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ), as demonstrated by the first chart, but it certainly demands the highest revenue per unit, according to the second. While Dell, HP, and Lenovo still bring in higher revenues than Apple, a lot of that goes to covering their operating and production costs. Conversely, Apple is pocketing nearly 20 percent of revenues as pure, delicious profit. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus all bring in only a fraction of Apple’s margins. And when all tallied, Apple alone rakes in more total profit than the top 5 PC vendors combined — or at least it did in the fourth quarter of 2012, which Asymco says “perhaps” demonstrated the largest quarterly decline in PC shipments in the last two decades.

Here’s a breakdown of how Asymco’s Dedieu came up with the numbers:

The only inference I made was with respect to Apples margins for the Mac. These are based on deriving a gross margin of 26% and adding an estimate of the SG&A and R&D overhead of 7.1% of sales, a figure which applies to the entire company. This yield an operating margin of 18.9%.

If this estimate is considered then the operating profits from PC operations imply that Apple generates more profit than all the top 5 PC vendors combined.

Assuming further that other vendors have the same profitability ratio as the top 5 combined yields a figure of 45% profit capture of PC market for Apple. This is not as good as its performance in the phone market, where Apple has about 72%, but its not bad.

Because Dedieu only inferred Apple’s margins on the Mac, there’s definitely some room for error in his calculations, but it seems fair to say that Apple is still walloping competitors when it comes to profit, even if the Windows PC is still the computer of choice for the broad population.

It might be too late for PCs — even Apple has contributed to the cannibalization of computer sales with its tablets and smartphones — but it does seem companies like Dell and HP could take a cue from Apple and focus on more high-end products. There are plenty of customers willing to shell out extra cash for quality, or at least perceived quality — Apple has demonstrated that. And with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, there’s less need for low-end computers anyway. The strongest part of the PC market going forward will likely be the most powerful laptops and desktops, those that can perform tasks that simply can’t be done on small mobile devices.

Microsoft will also have to play a leading role in such developments, though. Apple certainly has an advantage in that it designs its own software and hardware, which means they fit together seamlessly. Microsoft, too, could take its cue from Apple here, and work more closely with PC makers to develop a high-end product with great appeal — something that’s not only powerful, but that connotes the same sort of elite status that Apple has used to distinguish itself in its comeback years.

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In some cases, Detwiler Fenton said returns have even exceeding sales. Complaints reportedly range from the maps feature, lack of apps, and the user interface — all inherent problems with the new BlackBerry 10 operating system rather than the hardware itself, which means BlackBerry’s other new phones will probably have the same issue, if people are buying them at all.

BlackBerry shares started to hemorrhage in early morning trading following the analyst warnings, and closed the day down 7.76 percent.

“The U.S. launch of the Z10 started poorly and weakened significantly as the days passed,” Joseph Fersedi, an analyst at ITG Investment Research, told clients in a note today, citing information from independent dealers. Analysts at Detwiler Fenton said the main complaint about the new user interface was that it wasn’t intuitive enough.

However, a spokesperson for BlackBerry says, “speculation that there have been abnormally high levels of returns of BlackBerry Z10 devices” is “absolutely false.”

“Our data shows that return rates for BlackBerry Z10 devices both in the U.S. and on a global basis are in line with or better than our expectations and are consistent with return rates for other premium smartphones in the market today,” said Patti McKague, Senior Manager of Public Relations for BlackBerry.

The Canadian smartphone maker is relying on the touch-screen Z10, its first to use the BlackBerry 10 platform, to help reinvigorate the brand, which has seen its market share whittled away by Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Samsung (SSNLF.PK), and other smartphone manufacturers using Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android platform.

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According to a Wall Street Journal report, a person familiar with the situation said that 7-inch tablets were not part of Microsoft’s product plans last year, but that executives have realized they need to respond to the growing demand for smaller, more affordable tablets.

Unfortunately, Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg noted via Twitter today that a smaller tablet would pose some usability challenges to Microsoft’s full Windows OS, which means a “Surface mini” would have to run on Windows RT. However, the RT operating system still takes up a significant amount of a device’s memory. A 32-gigabyte Surface RT currently has only 15GB of storage available for user content, out of the box, which means roughly 17GBs are taken up by the operating system. At that size, Microsoft won’t be able to create a comparable competitor for Apple’s 16GB iPad mini…

Even if Microsoft can figure out the operating system for the new device, it will still struggle with the same adoption woes that have plagued the larger-scale Surface tablets. Sales have been mediocre thus far — a report from March estimated that only 1.5 million units of the two Surface tablets had sold since the Surface RT launched in October 2012. The Surface Pro, which went on sale in February 2013 and runs a full version of Windows 8 and Microsoft refers to as a “laptop in tablet form,” accounted for less than a third of those sales…

However, its thinking is spot-on. As PC sales continue to wane — research firms Gartner and IDC on Wednesday said sales of PCs fell by double-digit percentages in the first quarter of 2013 — tablet sales are booming, particularly sales of smaller-scale, lower-priced tablets. In fact, IDC reported that half of all tablets shipped in the fourth quarter of 2012 were smaller than 8 inches.

This time around, Microsoft might want to think about how to competitively price its tablets — when given the choice between a $499 iPad and a $499 Surface RT, it seems customers are still overwhelmingly choosing Apple’s tablet. A smaller Surface with the same price as the competing iPad mini would likely fare just as poorly as its big brother.

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Samsung says the size makes the smartphone ideal for watching videos or running two apps alongside each other — less ideal for carrying in one’s pocket, though, or even a small purse.

The Galaxy Mega falls in the so-called “phablet” category Samsung helped popularize with its original 5.3-inch Galaxy Note in 2011. A phablet is essentially a small tablet with the functionality of a phone.

Impractically large, the phablet shocked many in its success. But it seems the trend of shrinking down mobile devices has reversed. Even Apple has increased the size of its iPhone in order to accommodate a longer-lasting battery and have a bigger screen (though Apple’s larger iPhone is small in comparison to Samsung’s, with a 4-inch screen). With gaming and video-watching become such popular activities on smartphones — perhaps more popular than actual calls — larger screens have become assets to phone makers, in spite of their drawbacks…

“We are aware of a great potential in the bigger screen for extensive viewing multimedia, web browsing, and more,” said JK Shin, CEO and head of the IT & mobile business at Samsung Electronics. “We are excited to provide another choice to meet our consumers’ varying lifestyles, all while maintaining the high-quality features of the award-winning Galaxy series.”

However, Samsung may be pushing its luck with the new Galaxy Mega, which borders on comically large for a phone. In fact, it seems too big and too cumbersome to actually be used as a traditional telephone. While Samsung contends that the phone is still small and light enough to fit in its users’ pockets, the firm is hedging its bets with a smaller version of the Mega, which still offers a relatively large 5.8-inch screen.

There’s no doubt the phone fills a unique niche. The question that remains to be answered is whether there is enough demand for a tablet-like smartphone to justify the existence of this new market, and reward Samsung with its new entry. Only initial sales figures will tell.

Samsung will begin to roll out the phones in May, starting in Europe and Russia.

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Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is under heavy scrutiny in Europe as big name companies like Microsoft and Nokia increase pressure on antitrust regulators to take action against the search giant for blocking competition in mobile telephony. On behalf of Google’s rivals, lobbying group FairSearch made its complaint to the European Commission public on Tuesday, accusing the company of using Android to divert traffic to its search engine. Google is currently fighting to avert $5 billion fine, or 10 percent of its 2012 revenue.

Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU) and Canadian operator Shaw Communications (NYSE:SJR) have completed their first field trial in North America of a 400 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) data transmission over an existing optical link carrying live network traffic. The trial ran over a 400 kilometer route through Canada, using Shaw’s existing high-capacity transport network, which was designed to support speeds up to 100 Gbps. Using Alcatel-Lucent’s 400 Gbps technology, the trial proved that the existing optical network needn’t be replaced in order to ramp up speed.

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Jindal, of online investor community Stockr, says Apple’s reluctance to make any major acquisitions — the company instead opts to create businesses internally or make small, tuck-in acquisitions of companies with innovative technologies but only a handful of employees and products — makes no sense in light of its giant cash stockpile and waning enthusiasm for the stock, according to an Investor’s Business Daily report.

It was one thing for Apple to stick with what worked — it became one of the most valuable companies in the world using this strategy — but Apple’s stock is deteriorating quickly, down 40 percent since September on concerns about slowing growth, and Jindal says the company needs a big acquisition for a shot of adrenaline to get things back on track. The company is in the position to acquire just about any company that takes its fancy, and yet has stubbornly held to an old model that isn’t working as well as it once was.

With $40 billion in cash and short-term marketable securities, Apple has the means to make some interesting acquisitions, said Jindal, especially in cloud computing and mobile payments, two major growth areas around the world. Apple also has $97 billion in long-term marketable securities that it could leverage.

Jindal asked members of the Stockr community to come up with some ideas for potential Apple acquisitions, and here’s what they came up with:

1. Dropbox
2. Square
3. Lytro
4. Nuance

Dropbox is a pretty obvious choice, given its broad popularity and the fact that Apple has fumbled in the cloud computing department. Dropbox would be the perfect complement to iCloud, or could even replace the underwhelming service, which doesn’t even support non-iOS devices.

“In the few instances where Apple has been willing to build services for other platforms (e.g., iTunes), they enjoyed a fantastic windfall for their hardware sales,” Jindal wrote in a report. He also notes that Dropbox’s recent Mailbox acquisition could serve as a mobile replacement for Apple’s own email client. Further still, “Dropbox is quickly positioning itself as one of the few threats to Google’s (GOOG) cloud productivity suite, and Apple desperately needs to become competitive here.”

Apple is also trying to build a mobile payments presence with Passbook, but so far the application is seriously lacking in that it just doesn’t have enough partners to be truly relevant to the average consumer, and acts more as a gift card than a credit card. Square, meanwhile, already has a solid base of retailers that accept its mobile payments, which Jindal says when combined with the 300 million credit cards Apple already has on file with its iTunes store, could instantly make Apple a mobile payments leader. Not to mention, Apple would bring founder Jack Dorsey on board, the man behind Square and Twitter.

Sadly, Jindal contends, “the probability of this acquisition remains low, as Apple is likely building an internal solution to mobile payments, and the private market valuation of Square is inflated.”

Lytro is a start-up manufacturer of light-field cameras, groundbreaking in that they let users change the focus of a picture after it’s been taken.

“This is some of the most innovative camera technology the world has seen in a long time, with incredibly strong intellectual property,” Jindal wrote. “Buying Lytro and integrating their technology into the iPhone would create a serious competitive advantage for a key component of smartphone devices.”

However, Jindal notes that, “a potential roadblock to this acquisition is the difficulty of integrating this technology into such a small device.”

Finally we come to Nuance Communications (NASDAQ:NUAN), a company with a deep patent portfolio for speech-recognition. Siri anyone? Apple is believed to already license some of Nuance’s technology for its own personal voice assistant, and Jindal says that, as Apple moves into “wearable technology,” it will be relying more and more on “natural language processing and speech recognition.” And as iPhone users know, Siri still struggles sometimes with comprehension — she could use a pal to help with the nuances of various accents and languages.

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