AT&T sold 110K smartphones a day last quarter, including 7.2M iPhones and 2.2M Android phones

AT&T took a moment to toot its own horn this morning, announcing that it sold more than 10 million smartphones in the last quarter.

And while the company didn’t announce a product-level breakdown, thanks to Kantar Worldpanel data released last week we can guesstimate that this translates to 7.2 million iPhones, 2.2 million Android phones, and some small number of BlackBerry and Windows phones. Those numbers are interesting, as Apple’s Q1 2013 financials are coming in just a couple of weeks, with estimates as high as 55 million iPhones sold.

“During the quarter, we averaged more than 110,000 smartphone sales a day as customers flocked to our leading portfolio of the latest Android, Apple, and Windows devices,” AT&T President and CEO Ralph de la Vega said in a statement.

Significantly, de la Vega did not mention BlackBerry in his statement. Windows Phone has become the third contender in the U.S. mobile market — because, according to that same Kantar data, Microsoft surged into third place with 2.7 percent of the U.S market, while RIM free-fell from seven percent the previous quarter to just 1.4 percent in the Christmas quarter.

The numbers are big, there’s no question.

AT&T’s huge quarter undoubtedly helped Apple push above 50 percent market share for the first time ever in the U.S. market, as the massive mobile carrier was, of course, the first (and for years the only) iPhone-carrying telecom, giving it an advantage in high-end wireless customers that continues to this day. And, perhaps, something of a bias toward iPhone.

Humility is, of course, a key AT&T virtue, which explains the next part of de la Vega’s statement:

“Combine that with the nation’s largest 4G network and lightning-fast LTE network that now reaches more than 170 million people and you’ll understand why customers continue to choose AT&T in record numbers.”

AT&T’s full financial results for the quarter will be released the same day as Apple’s: January 24.

photo credit: GlennFleishman via photopin cc