A recent CNBC report said that SK Telecom (the South Korean carrier who had owned Helio) is again in talks to acquire Sprint Nextel. This rumor has been floating around for the past year or so.

Here's how it went down, according to Barron's: CNBC, which attributed its report to people familiar with the talks, said that the South Korean carrier would be joined by private equity firms in the deal. CNBC also said an actual deal is not imminent, and that "any agreement would be weeks away at best. And they also said that the Sprint board is divided on whether to sell the company, and that SK Telecom would only do a friendly deal."

After that report hit the wires, the Wall Street Journal ran another one that said that the two companies have been in preliminary talks "to form a strategic partnership to develop new handsets and services," according to "people familiar with the matter," but an outright merger is not under consideration. Who's right? Beats us.

Update: SK Telecom has now put up an official statement saying that they're not buying Sprint. Guess that settles it.

Sprint is on the ropes lately, judging from the increasingly bad numbers. As The New York Times reports, AT&T and Verizon, the industry's behemoths, are recruiting Sprint customers who have grown tired of years of inattentive customer service and a lackluster array of cellphones.

Investors have also lost patience, the report said, as the company's share price has dropped 58 percent since May 2007.

"What do you do when you hit rock bottom?" asked Roger Entner, a senior vice president at IAG, a market research firm. "It's going to take a lot to turn this company around."

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MediaPost reports that while disclosing the company's considerable financial troubles in the first quarter, Sprint Nextel's CEO on Monday offered "few details on the status of its heavily-promoted $99.99 Simply Everything plan" providing unlimited voice and data service.

"It's too early to make any definitive statements about the success of Simply Everything but so far," said Sprint CEO Dan Hesse in an analyst conference call, according to the report. "It's doing better than we had expected not only for new acquisitions but especially for customer retention."

In corporate speak, the phrase "it's doing better than we had expected," without numbers to back it up, usually means that they've sold more than zero. Regardless, let's hope their customer service and churn issues simply go away.

Bucking the trend set by AT&T and Verizon, both of which were boosted by their respective wireless businesses in Q1, Sprint Nextel managed to lose a million subscribers in the quarter.

InformationWeek reports that the third-largest US cellco now has 52.8 million customers and expects subscriber numbers to keep falling, at least through Q2.

Sprint has had major problems since it bought Nextel in 2005, and the rumors that it's trying to unload its Nextel unit can't be helping the situation. Neither can the rumors that Sprint itself is a takeover target, including reports last week that Deutsche Telekom might want to acquire Sprint and merge it with its T-Mobile USA unit.

Nearly lost under the weight of the news stories detailing Sprint's new WiMAX partnership with Clearwire and other industry heavyweights was the announcement that the cellco has named Google as the default search engine on its Internet-enabled handsets.

Fierce Mobile Content reports that the newly expanded partnership calls for some Sprint phones to feature Google Maps, one-click access to Google search and location-aware maps and search. Sprint has also agreed to provide its subscribers with easier and better mobile access to Google's YouTube video site.

One takeover bid falls apart, another one is rumored to be in the works. Shares of Sprint rose early this morning due to a number of reports that German telco Deutsche Telekom is looking at it as a potential takeover target.

According to Bloomberg, reports of DT's interest first surfaced in Der Spiegel over the weekend.

Deutsche Telekom owns Sprint rival T-Mobile USA. A merger of the two would result in a wireless operator that would give AT&T a run for its first-place market share.

If the reports are true, what are the chances of such a deal actually surviving the gauntlet of antitrust issues?

If you want to see just how unlimited your unlimited data plan truly is, Sprint is giving you the opportunity next weekend with its live stream of the NFL Network's broadcast of the NFL Draft on April 26 and 27.

To keep you occupied while the teams seemingly take forever to make their picks, Sprint has some other Draft-related content including player blogs, text alerts so you know when your team makes its picks, a Draft tracker with live updates so you know when to tune back in, interviews, player bios and analysis.

(Image credit: Jupiterimages Unlimited)

Sprint apparently wants to keep mobile content providers honest, particularly those offering their wares off-deck. RCR Wireless News reports that Sprint told aggregators who provide direct-to-consumer content that they will be penalized if they violate the guidelines from the Mobile Marketing Association. These violations include charging too much for subscription services, not allowing consumers to easily opt-out of a campaign and a couple dozen more.

The policy reportedly went into effect on April 1. Content partners who have numerous transgressions might find themselves not receiving any of their expected revenue share or losing the short code for their text-message campaign. Understanding the value of positive reinforcement, the carrier might up the revenue share for partners who don't stray from the guidelines.

In a release issued Friday, Sprint said it was chosen by the Archdiocese of New York to provide "critical communications support" for the Pope's visit to New York City, including 600 Sprint phones featuring Nextel's push-to-talk service, MediaPost reports.

Of those, "40 phones will be used by the Elite Fleet, including the Pope's Caravan, all Cardinals and the Vatican VIP personnel," Sprint's release said.

As the MediaPost report wryly noted, however, "nothing short of a miracle will keep Sprint from hemorrhaging subscribers. The company has already said it expects to lose 1.2 million customers in the first quarter of 2008 and a similar amount in the second quarter." Ouch.

In an ominous reminder of AOL's infamous You-Can't-Cancel policies, Reuters reports that Sprint, fighting to retain customers, is changing employee bonus plans to double the importance of stopping cancellations, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed on Tuesday:

"A short-term incentive plan for company officers sets performance targets for the last three quarters of the year. Churn, or cancellations, counts for 40 percent of the target, while two measures of cash flow and earnings were weighted at 20 percent each and customer care calls were weighted at 20 percent."

Back in February, the weighting of churn was 20 percent. The report listed the rest of the breakdown: 30 percent of the incentive was based on a measure of operating income, the number of calls for customer care was 30 percent, and a type of subscriber additions was 20 percent.

So if you're looking to cancel your Sprint plan, steel your nerves, pour yourself some strong coffee, and pull up a chair; it could be a long phone call.

(Image credit: Clipart.com)