Sprint loses more customers; can it ever stop the bleeding?

But that's not stopping more valuable contract customers from continuing to leave in droves. Even with the mid-June release of the Palm Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM) Pre smartphone -- widely credited with being the first true competitor to the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone -- Sprint didn't highlight that launch this week in reporting its quarterly results. This is no surprise, since the device launched at the very end of the quarter. Still -- can Palm help save all the customer defections from Sprint to larger competitors like AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) and Verizon Wireless -- each of which added over one million subscribers in their respective recent quarters?

Sprint's loss for the quarter was $384 million, or 13 cents a share, as sales fell 10%. Sprint lost 991,000 contract subscribers, but gained 777,000 prepaid lines from its Boost Mobile unit -- which equals an overall customer loss total of 257,000 customers. But the larger question remains: how much more valuable were the contract customers it lost over the prepaid customers it gained? Try this: contract customers spent an average of $56 per month in the quarter, while prepaid customers averaged $34. That's the whopper.