By Scott Moritz

Android lands at T-Mobile Tuesday, and as part of the effort to deliver the Google phone to the mobile market, T-Mobile is considering including free e-mail access.

The new Android-powered phone will have Google’s (GOOG) Gmail service built in, and T-Mobile executives are considering offering access to Gmail free, without the need for a data plan, says one person close to the discussions.

The HTC-manufactured T-Mobile phone will be the first of the hotly-anticipated Android-operated handsets, and one of several new challengers to Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. The Android project was created by Google to cultivate an open application platform to operate next-generation mobile phones.  T-Mobile  – a unit of Deutshe Telekom (DT) - is expected to unveil the phone during a press conference at 10:30 ET Tuesday, and offer it for sale later this fall.

Analysts see the Google phone as the beginning of an important lead in mobile Internet advertising through ads appearing on Android powered phones. Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst with Collins Stewart, estimates that the phone will generate $5 billion in incremental revenue for Google by 2011.

Should T-Mobile decide to offer free Gmail access, it would be seen as a big counter move to Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry e-mail service, which costs $15 a month extra. And if telcos embrace Google’s ad-supported free e-mail, it could help drive Google’s ultimate aim to spread its successful desktop advertising business to mobile phones.

The move to provide free Gmail has risks, however.

T-Mobile could undercut its own data revenue stream from BlackBerry subscribers if users trade in their Curves and Pearls for the Android phone. But T-Mobile, the No.4 wireless shop, needs an attention-getting strategy like free e-mail to help set itself apart from bigger players like AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ) and Sprint (S).  

Google referred calls for comment to T-Mobile and a T-Mobile representative could not provide an immediate comment.

As for the HTC Android phone itself, one user who got an early trial described the slide out keyboard as a little awkward for some typing tasks. The browsing quality however was “better than BlackBerry and close to the iPhone.”

By Scott Moritz

Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), the struggling telecom equipment maker, on Tuesday named an old hand as its new chief executive. Former British Telecom (BT) chief Ben Verwaayen, who once ran Lucent’s international sales operations, has been hired to replace CEO Pat Russo.

Alcatel-Lucent also announced that Philippe Camus, the former co-chief of Airbus parent EADS, will take over as chairman, replacing Serge Tchuruk who, along with Russo, announced his resignation earlier this summer.  The news comes days after news reports identified Mike Quigley, the former president of Alcatel-Lucent, as the company’s top pick – a move that some analysts cheered.

Alcatel-Lucent shares fell 2% in late morning trading Tuesday as investors signaled their disappointment with the new hires.  As head of one of the world’s largest networking equipment companies, Verwaayen faces a difficult task of unifying the company’s disparate divisions some two years after New Jersey-based Lucent and France’s Alcatel combined.

“What a missed opportunity,” said Telecom Pragmatics analyst Sam Greenholtz after the announcement. Given Verwaayen’s international background, Greenholtz sees his appointment as a sign that the company is focusing on its European operations at a time when, he says, the company’s customer relationships in the United States are weakening.

“I am sure these guys that were chosen are worthy of the job but, it is not going to fix the poor relationships in the U.S.,” said Greenholtz.

Verwaayen spent four years at Lucent, with mixed results. He ran the company’s overseas sales and was a key proponent of the company’s vendor-finance strategy, which makes loans to customers to finance equipment purchases. Many of the loans turned sour in the post boom industry collapse, and Lucent was left holding billions of dollars in bad debt. At the same time, after the dot.com bubble burst, Verwaayen was credited with helping the company trim its product offerings and focus on a core group of financially-healthy customers.

Verwaayen left Lucent in 2001 to make way for Pat Russo, who was serving as CEO at Eastman Kodak (EK). Verwaayen then ran BT for for six years, overseeing the phone giant’s massive network upgrade known as 21st Century Network.  The expensive project has taken longer than analysts had expected, and with BT’s shares hitting a five-year low in March, Verwaayen was gone by May. 

For their part, Russo and Tchuruk went on to engineer the $11 billion merger of Alcatel and Lucent in 2006. But they have struggled from the start to integrate Lucent’s products and operations, based in New Jersey, with Alcatel’s Europe-based business, headquartered in Paris. Making matters worse, Alcatel-Lucent is facing stiff competition from Ericsson (ERIC) and China’s Huawei, among others. Amid the cutthroat rivalry, sluggish economies in the United States and Europe have forced phone companies to cut their networking-equipment spending.

In the nearly two years since the Alcatel-Lucent merger, sales have fallen 7.3% and the stock is down 55% as the company announced round after round of layoffs.

At the top of Verwaayen’s to-do list at Alcatel-Lucent: to bring the bifurcated company together and boost earnings. In July, Alcatel-Lucent posted its sixth quarterly loss in two years, a loss that prompted Russo and Tchuruk to announce they were leaving later this year.

By Scott Moritz

Delivering its second-quarter earnings Thursday, Nokia (NOK) offered a glimmer of optimism in an otherwise gloomy outlook for the tech market by raising its growth forecast ever so slightly.

Fueled by roaring sales in the rapidly developing so-called BRIC regions – Brazil, Russia, India and China – Nokia adjusted its worldwide mobile phone sales target to 10% or more growth this year from a more squishy “approximately 10%” level.

Nokia posted a 61 percent drop in second-quarter profit from a year ago to $1.75 billion due to 2007 gains on a joint venture. The adjusted second quarter profit was 58 cents per share, up from 43 cents a year ago and above the 56 cents analysts were expecting. Sales were $20.7 billion, up from $16.9 billion in the year-ago quarter and better than the $20 billion Wall Street expected.

The company sold 122 million phones in the second quarter for an average price of $117 each. Analysts had expected about Nokia to sell about 120 million phones at a $120 a piece.

The stock market cheered Nokia’s second quarter results, sending the stock up 7%, as anxiety eased briefly over the waning growth in wireless. Analysts gave the company high marks for delivering solid numbers despite carrying a stale product line up and broadening economic slowdown. If growth continues in theBRIC regions and some of Nokia’s new phones take off, the thinking is that Nokia will come out shining in a year where the rest of tech has been a wreck.

The Finnish phone giant, which holds about 40% of the total wireless phone market, has been able to avoid the economic fallout from the bust of the mortgage boom in Europe largely by pedaling lower-priced phones in hot new wireless markets.

On a conference call with analysts Thursday, Nokia executives pointed to countries like India, where the company had its “best period ever” as new phone buyers were signing up at a rate of seven million a month. The surge in India helped offset a slight cooling in China, where sales fell 16% from the first quarter level.

The executives also said they saw strong competition in the smartphone market in the second quarter. Nokia was caught flatfooted as it had few new phones to compete with Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone or the international expansion of Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry. But looking ahead, Nokia says it expects to launch ten new smartphones in the coming months to help revive its high-end lineup. And despite seeing no improvement in Europe and only a one percentage point gain to 5% market share in the United States, Nokia was upbeat about its prospects for the remainder of 2008.

“We have good confidence as we look out here to the end of the year,” CFO Rick Simonson said on the call.

It also doesn’t hurt that Nokia has watched Motorola (MOT), once its top competitor,  hit the rocks.

By Stephanie Mehta 

In case you missed it, today marks the deadline for submitting paperwork to the Federal Communications Commission for bidding in the upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction. Search-engine giant Google (GOOG) says it will participate, and analysts expect competing bids from Verizon Wireless — a joint venture of Verizon (VZ) and Vodafone (VOD) — and AT&T (T).

Google certainly has the financial firepower to make a winning bid. (The FCC essentially has set opening bids for the “C” block of licenses at $4.6 billion) But is Google in this auction to make a point, or is the company in it to win it?

We’re certainly seeing some strange body language out of Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. On the one hand, you’ve got Chris Sacca, head of special initiatives at Google, blogging last week that “regardless of which bidders ultimately win the auction, consumers will be the real winners…” Not exactly the posturing of a company that plans to do whatever it takes to grab the spectrum. Lynette Luna at Fierce Broadband Wireless predicts the wireless incumbents will prevail in the upcoming 700 MHz bidding.

And yet Google certainly has been ramping up its activities in the wireless arena lately, with its Open Handset Alliance and new location-based, GPS-like application for cell phone users.

Phil Asmundson, who heads up Deloitte & Touche’s technology, media and entertainment group,  is among those who think Google is playing for keeps. Sure, Google isn’t a phone company today, but, he says, Google owns “more dark fiber than any one else in the U.S.” (Dark fiber is fiberoptic cable that has been installed, but has not been “lit” with the necessary telecom equipment to transmit data and calls.) Asmundson adds: “It has a network that could lit relatively easily, and become a telecom company overnight.”

“I do think if you are an established player, you have to take Google seriously.”

Techland readers, what do you think: Is Google bidding in the upcoming spectrum auction with the ambition of becoming an alternative wireless operator, or has it already “won” by forcing the bidders to adhere to certain “open access” conditions, and by getting companies such as Verizon to announce plans to open its network to unlocked wireless devices?