AT&T Subscribers Prefer iPhone to Rivals 3-To-1

During the third quarter of this year, AT&T subscribers bought 6.1 million smartphones, of which a very large majority were iPhones.

The carrier reported today that it activated 4.7 million iPhones in the July -Sept. period, which means that 77% of all its smartphones came from Apple. Of these, 1.3 million were the newly-released Apple iPhone 5.

AT&T did not break down the operating system for each of the remaining 1.4 million devices, other than to say that it had "its best-ever sales quarter for Android and Windows smartphones."

The iPhone 5 debuted during this quarter, likely leading to a spike in sales -- the quarterly total was up 1.3 million year-over-year.

AT&T vs. Verizon

AT&T had exclusive rights to sell Apple smartphones for several years, and even though that agreement came to an end quite some time ago, a large percentage of iPhone users still subscribe to this network. A comparison of AT&T's and Verizon's smartphone sales for Q3 2012 demonstrates this.

As mentioned earlier, AT&T sold 6.1 smartphones: 4.7 million iPhones (of which 1.3 million were iPhone 5 units) and 1.4 million other devices last quarter.

Verizon, on the other hand, sold a total of 6.8 million smartphones in the July - Sept. period. Of these, 3.1 million were Apple iPhones -- 650,000 were the iPhone 5.

The numbers show Big Red's customers prefer Android -- 3.4 million of its sales last quarter ran Google's OS. The remaining 0.3 million in the total were BlackBerrys and Windows Phones.

AT&T's Quarterly Financials

In this video, President and CEO of AT&T Mobility, Ralph de la Vega, talks about how his company did in Q3 2012: