There was a time, not too long ago, when we heard news from Virgin Mobile at least three or four times a month. Since Sprint acquired them, however, we haven’t heard too much — even during the holiday season, when it seems we heard something from about every prepaid carrier. The lull in news could end soon, though. I missed it, but a few weeks back on Howard Forums a user claimed that big changes were coming February 16. Usually I let rumors like this go, but over the weekend another HoFo user noticed that Helio phones and plans are gone from Virgin Mobile’s website. Could this be a sign of things to come?

It looks like Leap Wireless is ready to sell. How far talks get is anyone’s guess, but all the talk this week centered on Leap seeking a buyer. While MetroPCS makes the most sense to most people, we’ve heard just about every cellular carrier other than Verizon connected to them. One carrier we haven’t heard much from this time around, but which has been mentioned as a potential buyer in the past is America Movil, parent company of Tracfone. The company doesn’t own any infrastructure in the U.S., though, so it would be quite a change in strategy to acquire some.

It would appear that for some prepaid wireless companies, lowering rates is an addictive habit. In November, Page Plus Cellular took the first step, lowering their ceiling rate to 10 cents per minute. They followed that up with improved international roaming rates, and finally, two weeks ago, lowered the prices of all their pay-as-you-go cards. Yesterday they made another announcement, this timecutting their domestic roaming rates in half. If there is a price war going on in the prepaid space, Page Plus is lying in the trenches, lobbing every grenade it has.

Last week we got a glimpse of Straight Talk’s fourth quarter success, as they reportedly added 450,000 subscribers. That represents about 38 percent of Tracfone’s fourth quarter adds. According to Ken Parks of The Wall Street Journal, Tracfone added 1.2 million subscribers across all of its services. Seems like the troika, including Net10, is doing just fine.

While Boost Mobile is busy showing off its shiny new BlackBerry, other prepaid carriers continue to roll out low-end models. These appeal to a portion of the prepaid segment becuase they’re so darn cheap — you can use the basic talk and text functions, which is what some people seek. Via Cell Phone Signal we learn that T-Mobile plans to launch the Samsung T139. It features a VGA camera and Bluetooth. That’s it. No word on pricing, but we should find out some time today.

Last we checked, Leap Wireless was talking to investment banks, hoping “to explore strategic options.” This usually means a company wants to see what a merger or acquisition would look like. Yesterday The Wall Street Journal reported (sub. required) that Leap has created a “special board committee” which will help it determine the best course of action going forward. Goldman Sachs Group will advise the company. This doesn’t necessarily mean a merger with MetroPCS, but given the state of the wireless industry it remains the clearest option.

While we won’t hear about Boost Mobile’s fourth quarter numbers until Sprint makes their announcement on February 10, last week we might have seen into the future. Motorola reported their own Q4 results, and while they showed progress in some areas, they were particularly lacking in prepaid. Co-CEO Sanjay Jha said that sales of phones to prepaid carriers were “particularly weak.” While a number of prepaid carriers offer Motorola phones, Boost Mobile sold Motorola phones exclusively until its recent CDMA expansion. Could this mean slow fourth quarter numbers for Boost? It might sound like it, but there’s no certainty. Even with this, I bet Boost finishes a bit ahead of where we saw MetroPCS and Cricket were — below last year, but too far.

The new year brings new developments in the prepaid wireless space. It also brings us new guests to talk about these developments. We saw a few quarterly earnings reports, heard a few rumors, and blogged about everything along the way. Now it’s time to take a look back at those events and what they mean for the rest of the industry. Joining me is Maisie Ramsay of Wireless Week.

So click on over to hear the Prepaid Podcast.

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Highlights include:

Browsing around Howard Forums on Wednesday, I found this thread, which claimed that Page Plus had a slew of new phones available on its website. Other users got a bit excited, but became deflated when they didn’t see the same thing on the website. I, too, was a bit disappointed. After we learned earlier in the week about Page Plus not activating brand new prepackaged Verizon prepaid phones, I thought Page Plus would benefit from offering some handsets of its own. But, when I checked the page, like so many others, I saw just the normal seven handsets. Thankfully, I checked back last night and found something a bit different.

Over the past few months we’ve seen a number of prepaid carriers add very low-level phones. This, I think, is because their customers want simple phones for cheap, and it’s tough to offer cheap handsets on prepaid. To that end, Cricket plans to launch the A150, a featureless phone manufactured by Cal-Comp, a brand unknown to me. No word on price or release, but I’d venture to guess 1) $50 or under and 2) soon.