Hedgehogging: hedge*hog*ging v. Interrupting conversations in an office environment by poking your head over the top of the cube.

While we won’t know for a couple of weeks how specific wireless carriers did during the holiday season, it is safe to assume as a whole they did pretty well. It was rare to pass a carrier-branded wireless store and not see hordes of people overwhelming sales staffs. More desperate were Apple stores – which already had to handle the gobs of shoppers ogling iPods and Macbooks – as well as iPhone shoppers. Our fearless predictions: Verizon Wireless did well; AT&T Mobility did well and sold a ton of iPhones; Sprint Nextel did O.K. on the CDMA side, continued to lose iDEN customers and its MVNO partners showed modest growth resulting in the carrier posting slightly positive net gains for the quarter; and T-Mobile USA posting near 1 million net adds helped by continued growth of its prepaid offering.
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On the handset side, we suspect beyond the continued influx of iPhone users, Motorola will keep its domestic dominance thanks to continued free offerings of its Razr handsets and growth of its non-Razr architecture models. Samsung and LG had enough variety of devices across nearly all carriers to keep up and Nokia will continue to find a solid base in the U.S. that it enjoys internationally. Wildcard? While only available through AT&T Mobility among the big 4, Sony Ericsson could post some domestic gains as well as RIM, which has seen its Pearl device gain traction among non-business users and been bolstered by carriers offering Blackberry-friendly pricing plans.
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A word on devices: It still amazes some of us that Apple was “forced” to offer early iPhone buyers a $100 credit following the companies $200 price cut on the device earlier this year. A quick perusing of our weekly handset price changes shows that most carriers routinely raise and lower the price of their handsets by sometimes several hundred dollars with little or no backlash from consumers. Just another example that Apple fan-boys are not a usual lot and that Apple needs to be wary of how it competes in the wireless space.
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It will be interesting to watch how Dan Hesse does as head of Sprint Nextel. There must still be great allure in running a wireless carrier – why else would Hesse leave Embarq (which is actually gaining wireless subscribers) for Sprint Nextel, which is losing customers.