tablets and the sorry state of US carriers
I am in the market for a tablet that I can use in the US. Looking around, the situation is bleak.
In principle, my European Galaxy Tab works fine on AT&T, but AT&T can’t figure out how to activate the SIM card or how I might pay for it; that requires a pre-installed app on their iPad. Buying a second Galaxy Tab just doesn’t make much sense.
T-Mobile doesn’t seem to have any tablets yet. Even if they did, they would likely only run at Edge speeds in Europe.
Tablets on Verizon are totally overpriced, as is their service; they also don’t work in Europe, and the only way you can use them anywhere is… to buy Verizon’s overpriced service. It’s no wonder that you can get iPad 2′s on Verizon; nobody wants them. Of course, they aren’t giving you a discount, their iPads are just as expensive as AT&T’s.
The only tablet that people know how to activate and that works in both Europe and the US (on AT&T) is the iPad 2. I don’t like the software that much, I think it has usability problems, and it uses the tiny SIM cards that are hard to get. Well, I’ll ponder it some more.
In Europe, the problem is the opposite: there is such a great selection of tablets becoming available on all carriers now that it’s hard to choose.
