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?