According to News.com, 100 people or so lined up outside Verizon’s midtown Manhattan store last night prior to its midnight opening. And various reports posted to Twitter suggest there were queues at other outlets as well, though quite a bit shorter (see below; click to enlarge).

In any event, the fact that there are lines at all must be a welcome sight for Verizon (VZ), which has been looking for a strong rival to Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, and for Motorola (MOT), which hopes Droid will revive its much-diminished post-Razr cellphone business. As one Verizon subscriber eager to trade up to Droid told me, “it’s the best smart phone not made by Apple.”

With endorsements like this, Motorola should be working a bit harder on branding the device as its own. Right now, the Droid marketing push from Verizon Wireless is so overwhelming that you’d think CEO Lowell McAdam designed it himself. Why aren’t we hearing from Motorola as well?

“Droid is potentially a game changer for Motorola,” iSuppli analyst Tina Teng said in a recent research note. “Motorola now is no longer just emphasizing slick form factors, such as it did with its RAZR handset. The company now has focused on the hottest segment of the global mobile handset market–providing compelling smartphone products that are usable and expandable through third-party applications.”

That being the case, Motorola might want to do a bit more to get its name out there.

Absent one-time charges, the company broke even for the quarter. Analysts had been expecting a two-cent loss on revenue of $609 million.

Good news, but it was tempered with a bit of bad. Because Sirius’s (SIRI) subscriber growth is slowing. The company ended the quarter with 18.5 million total subscribers. That’s up 103,000 from the second quarter, but down 2.1 percent from a year earlier.

“We are very pleased with what we accomplished during the third quarter, especially when considering the macroeconomic issues affecting consumers and the auto industry,” Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin said in a statement.

“We managed to grow revenue, grow ARPU, reduce operating costs, increase adjusted income from operations significantly, and refinance higher cost debt,” Karmazin added. “We look forward to continuing this performance. We grew subscribers and improved churn in the quarter, and we are well positioned to take advantage of an economic rebound. We expect to grow subscribers, revenue, and cash flow next year regardless of the magnitude of any recovery.”

In its second quarter–the first with the Pre in its lineup–Sprint (S) lost 991,000 postpaid subscribers. And in its third, reported yesterday, its lost 801,000. So subscriber loss, while unquestionably gruesome, is diminishing.

How much of this is due to Palm’s (PALM) Pre? Not that much, says CL King & Associates analyst Lawrence Harris, who believes the Pre had only a moderate impact on Sprint’s postpaid subscriber base.

“Within postpaid, the number of CDMA-only subscriber losses was about 100,000 in the September quarter, compared to the 200,000 in the June quarter,” Harris wrote in a research note to clients. “At Sprint, the Palm Pre is a CDMA-only postpaid device. The number of Sprint postpaid subscribers upgrading their handsets was slightly higher in the September quarter than in the June quarter at just over 2.0 million.”

According to Harris, “This number provides some indication of the available market for all high-end devices at Sprint. In Palm’s August quarter, 85% of the company’s sales went to Sprint. Given the absence of growth in Sprint’s CDMA postpaid category, it appears likely that most of the Palm Pre sales went to existing Sprint subscribers as opposed to winning customers from other carriers.”

That would seem to be the case. Sprint rivals AT&T (T) and Verizon Wireless (VZ) each added subscribers during the second quarter–1.4 million and 1.1 million, respectively. So if the Pre did anything for Sprint, it helped to stem CDMA postpaid losses a bit.

And that’s something, right? After all, there’s no panacea for Sprint’s affliction–well, perhaps there is, but it’s locked up in an exclusivity agreement with AT&T (T). Still, when Sprint last reported earnings, CEO Dan Hesse said the carrier expected to sign up more new customers as the Pre gained wider distribution through retail outlets like Best Buy (BBY) and RadioShack. And that doesn’t really seemed to have happened. Perhaps next quarter after Sprint launches the Pre’s not-quite-cheaper sibling, the Pixi.

UPDATE: A quick addendum. In a research note this morning, Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffett notes that while Sprint has reduced subscriber losses a bit, the cost of doing so has been worrisomely high.

“Yes, net subscriber losses were better,” Moffet explains. “But the cost was very high. Post-paid equipment subsidies soared to $139 per subsidized subscriber in Q3 (up 39 percent from last year), as the company recovered just 36 percent of their equipment costs….Yesterday’s results illustrate why it may not be possible for Sprint to have its cake and eat it too. After all the drastic cost cutting, after all the efforts to refresh the product line, after all the price cuts and new pricing plans, Sprint was able to manage only a modest improvement. Not growth, just a slightly slower rate of decline. And that Herculean effort almost broke the bank. The huge costs of even marginally improving gross additions (and the rate of net subscriber loss) crushed margins.”

Reporting a wider third-quarter loss than expected this morning, Sprint (S) said it lost 545,000 wireless customers and 801,000 more in the crucial postpaid category. That’s well below what analysts had feared, but brutal nonetheless. Even more so considering that AT&T (T) and Verizon Wireless (VZ) added two million and 1.2 million total customers respectively during their latest quarters.

As I said earlier this year, Sprint is hemorrhaging subscribers like Dan Ackroyd’s exsanguinating Julia Child. And it continues to do so. The company’s churn rate, or the measure of subscribers dropping service, was 2.17 percent, up from 2.05 percent in the second quarter. Alarming, to say the least, though as the charts below (click to enlarge) indicate, the bleeding is slowing a bit.

And what of Sprint’s financial performance for the quarter? Well, put it this way: The company lost nearly half a billion dollars. For the three months ending Sept. 30, Sprint lost $478 million, or 17 cents a share. This compares with a loss of $326 million, or 11 cents a share, during the same period in 2008.

Analysts had been expecting a loss of 21 cents a share for the quarter. Revenue was $8.04 billion, down nine percent from $8.82 billion last year and below consensus estimates of $8.09 billion for the quarter.

In other words, another tough quarter for Sprint. Said Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett: “The results illustrate the enormous challenge facing Sprint. Many of the cost cuts have already been taken. Their best exclusive handset has been deployed. And still, the rock rolls downhill.”

That’s the word from Broadpoint AmTech analyst Brian Marshall, who believes Apple (AAPL) will bring the iPhone to Verizon (VZ) in the second half of 2010 and forfeit AT&T’s “sweetheart” carrier subsidy as a result.

“While [Apple] started off with exclusive arrangements in 2007 with the original iPhone launch, the company has since migrated towards multiple carriers per region,” Marshall wrote in a note to investors. “In our view, diverse carrier support is a key element to driving global penetration of the iPhone. Therefore, we believe the chances are high the iPhone will find its way onto the [Verizon] network in 2H10.”

Of course, should things play out that way, the iPhone will no longer be the powerful subscriber-retention tool it is today. And Marshall believes that will lower the subsidy it commands from an estimated $450 to around $300.

This might seem to imply a nasty hit to Apple’s bottom line, but Marshall figures any losses Apple might suffer would be more than made up in volume. He sees Verizon selling roughly 14 million iPhones in the 2011 calendar year. And with an average selling price of $500, that’s another $7 billion in revenue for Apple.

Pretty damn badly.

Posting third-quarter earnings that topped Wall Street expectations this morning, AT&T (T) said it activated a record 3.2 million iPhones during the period (not surprising given Apple’s blowout quarter).

Of those, 40 percent were for customers new to the carrier. That’s quite a bit more than Wall Street expected, and this surge did much to balance continued weakness in AT&T’s wireline business (click on slide below to enlarge). In fact, if that 40 percent metric is accurate, then Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone single-handedly generated an astonishing 92 percent of AT&T’s post-paid subscriber growth.

“We delivered a terrific wireless quarter, IP data growth was strong and execution across the business continues to be solid,” AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said in an earnings release, and indeed, that would seem to be the case.

Wireless data-services revenue spiked 34 percent. And revenue from the wireless segment overall increased 8.2 percent as profit grew 41 percent. Wireless turnover rate fell to a record low of 1.4 percent.

Meanwhile, wireline revenue fell 7.1 percent, profit 30 percent.

So in the end, AT&T posted earnings of $3.2 billion, or 54 cents a share, down from $3.23 billion, or 55 cents a share, a year earlier. Revenue slipped 1.6 percent to $30.86 billion. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected per-share earnings of 50 cents on revenue of $30.88 billion.

At $26.86, shares of AT&T are up about 3.5 percent in early morning trading.

During a call with analysts Thursday to discuss second-quarter earnings, Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin said the app, which is currently the iTune App Store’s fourth most popular app in the music category and the 88th most popular overall, was intended more as a means of tempering subscriber churn than a means of driving new subscriptions.

“…unlike an awful lot of applications on the iPhone…we’re not offering free service,” Karmazin said. “What we are offering is the free download and a week’s trial, so this was never designed that we believe we were going to get a significant number of new subscribers. We are seeing an increase in the number of subscribers who are signing up for the $2.99 fee, to be able to stream the product in addition to having it, so a satellite radio subscriber who also has an iPhone is now able to do that with an incremental $2.99.”

So the app is bringing in some new revenue. How much isn’t clear though, since Sirius doesn’t break iPhone app numbers (subscribers or revenue) out. Karmazin admits, however, that it’s not much. “You should not consider them to be a very significant number related to our number of subscribers,” he said, adding, “It’s the right thing for us to do, we continue to believe in it, we’ll continue to do more of these things.”

Indeed it is: The Internet phone service provider reported a second-quarter profit of $2.3 million, or a penny a share. Wall Street had been expecting a loss of three cents a share. Great news.

Sadly for Vonage, however, the news was tainted by an increase in subscriber defections. The company lost 89,000 net subscribers during the quarter as churn rose to 3.2 percent from three percent. It ended the quarter with just 2.5 million lines.

“While our financial performance was strong, our subscriber base did not grow at expected levels due in part to the challenges of the current economy and the increasing impact of wireless substitution,” said Vonage Chief Executive Marc Lefar. “During the quarter, we launched our new marketing campaign, which we anticipate will drive new customer acquisition over time.”

“Anticipate” seems a generous word here. “Hope” is perhaps a better one. To lose almost 90,000 subscribers in a single quarter at time when the lousy economy should be inspiring cost-conscious consumers to sign up for Vonage’s discount service seems rather bleak. That better be some marketing campaign.

Reporting better-than-expected second-quarter earnings this morning, AT&T said it activated 2.4 million iPhone accounts–35 percent of them for new customers. And it saw its wireless data revenue rise 37.2 percent to $3.4 billion and subscriber churn fall to 1.09 percent, a record low.

Clearly, the debut of the iPhone 3GS and Apple’s decision to cut the price of the low-end iPhone to $99 had an enormous impact on AT&T’s bottom line. “AT&T iPhone subscribers, both new customers and upgrades, take two-year contracts with data packages,” the company said. “As a result, robust iPhone demand drives strong recurring revenues and substantial long-term value.”

Litter wonder, then, AT&T (T) is said to be doing it all it can to renew its iPhone exclusivity deal. The company is clearly dependent on the device for some of its most recent gains.

In fact, Commresearch analyst Gregory Lundberg says that were the iPhone to be excluded from the company’s latest financials, 25 percent fewer people would have signed up for its service in the second quarter than in the first. So if it’s true that Verizon (VZ) is in talks with Apple (AAPL) about adding the iPhone to its product lineup, AT&T has a lot to worry about, indeed.

As Pali Research recently noted, “As the iPhone exclusivity period rolls off between AT&T Wireless and Apple, a material number of AT&T customers will flock to Verizon’s superior network. We estimate that nearly a third of AT&T’s post-paid customers are being retained by AT&T primarily because of the iPhone exclusivity.”

So says Pali Research, which in a research note this week argued that AT&T (T) should be very worried about the prospect of Verizon adding the iPhone to its handset lineup.

“As the iPhone exclusivity period rolls off between AT&T Wireless and Apple, a material number of AT&T customers will flock to Verizon’s superior network,” the firm states. “We estimate that nearly a third of AT&T’s post-paid customers are being retained by AT&T primarily because of the iPhone exclusivity.”

An unsettling thought for AT&T, whose five-year agreement to be the iPhone’s sole U.S. provider is reportedly set to expire in 2010. Especially since there are several compelling reasons for Apple to offer the iPhone to Verizon (VZ).

For one thing, the move would give Apple access to about 80 million new Verizon customers. For another, it would bring the iconic device to a carrier that might, you know, reasonably support all its features, a carrier whose LTE “4G” network isn’t four-to-five years off, a carrier whose name doesn’t elicit laughter and jeers at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

So why extend AT&T’s exclusive deal? If there’s a good reason, Pali doesn’t see it. The research house is betting on the iPhone coming to Verizon. And when it does…

“We expect AT&T Wireless net subscriber additions to fall to less than 1 million in 2010 from more than 4 million in 2008. With an LTE-based iPhone in 2011, we believe Verizon could take even more market share resulting in a contraction in AT&T’s subscriber base in that year.”

“I don’t think that’s likely. We’re looking and talking to a lot of laboratories and big companies around the world, like Sony and Samsung. We’re all working on wireless readers for books or newspapers or for magazines. I think they’re a year or two away being marketed in a mass way, high quality ones, and we’ll be absolutely neutral. We’re happy to have our products distributed over any device provided it’s only going to subscribers paying for it.”

— Rupert Murdoch says News Corp. isn’t working on a Kindle of its own

“We still have a backlog of subscribers but it’s not unmanageable and we get shipments every week,” Brust told attendees of the Wachovia Equity Conference. “We’ll be short for a while but we’re catching up.”

Good thing. The new Palm (PALM) handset is not going to be much good at stemming subscriber losses if you can’t keep it in inventory. And as Sprint (S) well knows, there are other phones on the market, including one that’s $100 cheaper than the Pre, without the rebate.

Oh, and speaking of the iPhone 3GS, Brust says Apple’s latest handset hasn’t been having much of an impact on sales the Pre, though Apple (AAPL) sold one million units compared with a reported 50,000 for the Pre during its first weekend at market. “We don’t see any big change since the iPhone came out yet,” Brust said. “That may happen.”

That may happen. Heh.