Samsung Galaxy Tab for AT&T in Training; Early Pricing Revealed? (You Won’t Like This)
The biggest factor in driving many users’ purchase decisions on today’s Android tablets comes down to ultimately one thing: price. Even with the best specs you could ask for in an Android tablet, the price will make or break that deal for many people. We’ve heard the ridiculously high off-contract prices for the Samsung Galaxy Tab before, but what about getting the device with a data-only plan on one of four US carriers and several carriers in other parts of the world?
At least for AT&T, we may already have an answer. According to a source of AndroidGuys‘ – and we know them to have a pretty trusty AT&T source as they were the ones to break the HTC Aria story – the carrier has begun training for the tablet and some early pricing figures may have already been thrown around. I’m not sure if the wording was misinterpreted, but be looking to spend some nice big bucks if you want to use this over AT&T’s data network.
This pricing scheme is weird in that they don’t only go month-by-month, but day-by-day, and week-by-week, as well. For day-to-day, you can pay $15 and get 100MB for every day that you want to use data. That can get pretty pricey if you aren’t careful. For week-to-week usage, expect to shell out $30 to get 300MB for 7 days, or you can opt for the $50 plan which would give you 1GB of data for 30 days.
These prices seem pretty scary, but I’m not the least bit surprised. AT&T’s been trying to find ways to keep their subscribers from using too much bandwidth by introducing tiered data plans and getting rid of unlimited usage. Especially for a dedicated tablet, they’d expect Galaxy Tab users to use more data than those on – say – an iPhone or an Android handset. I can’t imagine this will end up being the final pricing, however, as a quick look at their offerings for the Apple iPad are a bit easier to swallow.
I’m hoping AG’s source is either completely wrong or that AT&T’s just thrown some dummy numbers out and it happened to get into the wrong hands too soon. This also makes me interested to see how other carriers will handle plans and pricing for the Galaxy Tab as we know each of them treat data offerings on smartphones significantly different from one another.