Friday Apple Rumors: AAPL, Samsung Smartphone Sales Overwhelm HTC

Here are your Apple Rumors and AAPL news items for today.

Against AAPL and Samsung, HTC Comes in a Distant Third: Back in February, weeks before the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Taiwan-based HTC said its fourth quarter was dismal and its prospects for first quarter 2012 weren�t much better. On Friday, the company did in fact report Q1 net income of $150 million, down from $370 million in the previous quarter and down from $502 million in Q1 2011. HTC, currently the No. 5 smartphone maker, acknowledges the two main reasons it has been difficult for the company to rise in the rankings of smartphone makers: Apple, whose sales account for about 75% of mobile industry profits, and Samsung, which accounts for another 15% of those earnings. Still, HTC did report that sales in March were up 52%, to about $1 million, over February. Apple posted earnings of $13 billion for its first quarter, which ended Dec. 31, and will announce it second-quarter results on April 24. HTC is hanging its hopes on three new phones in its �One� lineup, which were unveiled at MWC.

AT&T OK�s iPhone Unlock for Out-of-Contract Customers: Apple Rumors mentioned the other day that maybe AT&T�s (NYSE:T) out-of-contract customers� best shot at getting their iPhones unlocked was to email a request for an unlock to Apple CEO Tim Cook�s office, which, at least in some cases, had been affirming the requests and forwarding them to AT&T. Kind of an awkward and somewhat tedious remedy to what had been AT&T�s tendency to balk at unlock requests. But this week, AT&T announced that, beginning April 8, it would unlock AT&T iPhones for customers whose accounts are in good standing and have fulfilled their contract term, �upgraded under one of our upgrade policies,� or paid an early termination fee. As Apple Insider notes, an unlocked AT&T iPhone would be capable of connecting to networks using the GSM communications standard, which has been adopted by most carriers worldwide. The phone would not work on Verizon�s (NYSE:VZ) network, which uses the CDMA standard.

Facilitators of Teen�s Kidney-for-iPhone Plan Face Legal Action: Last June, a report surfaced about a 17-year-old in China�s Anhui province who sold one of his kidneys so he could buy an iPhone and iPad. This week, five people who enabled the transaction, including a surgeon, were charged with intentional injury by prosecutors in Hunan province, who say the boy now suffers from renal dysfunction. One of the defendants received a total of about 220,000 (about $35,000) for the kidney, paying the boy 22,000 yuan (about $3,500) while splitting the rest with the surgeon and other medical staff. Demand for transplant organs far exceeds the supply in China, which has a thriving, if illegal, and a black market for human organs. The organ-for-iPhone market is, we hope, less robust.