We know. We know. We rag on Sprint too much. But seriously:

Sprint Nextel Corp. swung to a huge fourth-quarter loss of $29.5 billion on Thursday as it wrote down most of the remaining value of its 2005 purchase of Nextel Communications Inc. and continued to lose customers to competitors. -

Now, most of that huge number is due to the fact that Sprint has basically given up on integrating the Nextel side of things fully. If you exclude those bits, it's not too bad. We already reported that they lost 683,000 subscribers last quarter (though that's offset by big gains in pre-paid, less lucrative Boost mobile accounts). We're not starting the Sprint deathwatch yet, but our finger's on the stopwatch button.

We're not saying the 2 hour Sprint Store closings today for a “special webcast” are really about Alltel buying them out, mind you. We wouldn't suggest that Sprint is ripe for a takeover by an upstart network that's been gaining remarkable traction in certain areas of the country. That would be crazy. Practically Tom Cruise crazy.

Those sessions are probably just about the now-unveiled $99-for-everything plan. Right?

So did you know that the BlackJack II has a LED that's capable of displaying 7 different colors? Me: I did not. But QoreFunctions did, and they've made a neat little app that lets you map all them pretty colors to different alerts on your phone, from email to SMS to missed calls. LedAlerts.

Features:

• Activate external LED based on specific event
• Control 7 different LED colors on BlackJack II
• Ability to assign different LED to each event
• Manages Simultaneous Active LEDs
• User Selectable Active LED Duration

Fully utilizing the LED just makes sense - saves you time and battery life because you don't have to power up the screen to see exactly why your phone wants attention. Oh, and it also works with the HTC S730, Verizon SMT5800, and T-Mobile Dash/S620 -- just without all the pretty colors.

During the Mobile World Congress The Unwired View sat down with Microsoft's corporate vice president of the Mobile Communications Group, Todd Warren. They discussed the XPERIA and also, somewhat excitingly, the multimedia and usability updates we can expect to come to Windows Mobile.

Warren:

we are also working on improving the base of media and picture experiences as part of Windows Mobile. You can expect, I would say, pretty dramatic changes to those in future versions of the product.

Really, though, head over and read the article. Good stuff on Zune integration, improvements to the Touch interface, and collaboration with HTC on making WM integrate better with HTC's TouchFLO

It turns out that the email we reported on last week by HTC CEO Peter Chou was, in fact, accurate. HTC does indeed have a fix they're currently testing for beleaguered video lovers with HTC devices.

Brighthand is reporting that HTC has released a statement confirming that they have a software fix that “dramatically” improves performance, one they hope to release soon.

The fix isn't a video driver - that would, as we gathered from our insider Q&A, be a massive undertaking involving (we suspect) nearly as much work as just flat-out making a new device. It's not ideal (as HTCClassAction.org fully explains), but maybe it's enough to tide us over. Maybe?

Here's the statement:

Some of our top engineers have investigated video performance on our devices and have discovered a fix that they claim will dramatically improve performance for common on-screen tasks like scrolling and the like. The update is in testing and we hope to release it soon.

However this fix is not a new video driver to utilize hardware acceleration; it is a software optimization. Video drivers are a much more complicated issue that involves companies and engineers beyond HTC alone. We do not want to lead anyone to believe they should expect these.

After the break (because we somehow managed to not post it when Engadget originally reported it back on January 25th), HTC's original, official statement on the issue.

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