Much has been written about Sprint Nextel Corp.'s (NYSE: S) follies in recent quarters. The third-largest wireless carrier in the U.S. has lost millions of customers to larger and more successful competitors like Verizon Wireless and AT&T, Inc. (NYSE: T). But, with the launch of an extremely successful iPhone competitor (among other things), the company is showing signs of stemming its huge customer defections from past quarters.

The word of support initially came from Verizon Wireless President Denny Strigl , who told investors that Sprint's performance had picked up in the last months -- although Verizon still didn't consider Sprint to be a threat to Verizon Wireless' current results. Still, any improvement for Sprint is a good thing. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse, a wireless industry veteran with a largely successful track record, is the right person to be leading Sprint as well. So, are all the cards lined up for Sprint to become a resurgent force in the U.S. wireless industry?

It's stock has rebounded in a decent way, closing up from mid-March's $6/share to $8.91 recently (it closed yesterday at $8.94/share). Although Sprint lost over a million customers in the first quarter of 2008, the numbers should not be that bad in the second quarter. Sprint also won't be sold any time soon. Verizon Wireless, which just bought Alltel from its private owners, is the only company that could have made a merger work in buying Sprint Nextel. It would be disastrous to have another company come in and try to emulate what Sprint attempted with Nextel back in 2005, which has turned out to be a complete disaster and has led to tens of billions in write-offs (do you hear me now, Deutsche Telekom?).

Sprint has the chops to turn itself around in 2009 with some solid management and good decisions, but it still won't be easy. Spinning off the Nextel network (oops, I mean selling the spectrum off) and migrating all those customers to Sprint's network -- along with heavy retention incentives -- may be Hesse's biggest bet yet. That is, if he has the cahones to do it.

Nokia Corporation (ADR) (NYSE: NOK) is a well known, and quite successful phone manufacturer. So it's no surprise to find out that, like many other companies, they've felt a need to come out with a phone that competes with Apple, Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL)'s very successful iPhone.

Nokia has announced that they're working on 'an iPhone killer' according to this article at Forbes with the 5800 Tube. Well, since I started keeping track of Apple's stock as an investor myself (so keep in mind my bias), I've seen a number of iPod killers come and go. And I've seen on iPhone killer come and go. And they've all made similar mistakes in their approaches, so I've come up with four points to help Nokia, and other potential smartphone makers, go up against the iPhone without more flops. Because after all, those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

1) Do not announce that your device is a 'killer.'

The moment you announce that you are working on a 'killer' you've just raised expectations. Apple already has a halo of hard to meet expectations around it, leading invariably to disappointed fans when the actual device comes out (what, the iPhone doesn't make TOAST? Are you kidding me? I thought it would have a terabyte of memory and make toast!). So now you've not only set yourself up to have to beat a popular and bestselling device, but you're expected to beat it in a big way! You're not expected to just match it now, but also beat it.