BGR: AT&T Retail Managers Order Staff to Slow iPhone Sales

Zach Epstein, writing for BGR:

Regional retail sales managers at AT&T have been instructing store managers to pump the brakes on Apple’s iPhone. Instructions handed down from corporate state that customers seeking smartphones at AT&T retail stores should be steered away from Apple’s iPhone and towards Android phones or Windows Phone handsets like the Nokia Lumia 900 instead. BGR has confirmed the directive with three independent sources. […]

AT&T contacted BGR via email and supplied the following statement:

The idea that we would steer any customer away from a particular device couldn’t be more farfetched.

Farfetched, eh? Like this:

In 2010, AT&T Inc., then Apple’s exclusive carrier partner, approached RIM about a plan to develop a touch-screen rival to the iPhone, said two former RIM executives.

★ Wednesday, 1 August 2012