AT&T will sell the Galaxy Tab for $650?

According to Engadget, AT&T has finally announced its pricing and availability for Samsung's Galaxy Tab Android tablet. AT&T carefully evaluated the prices announced by Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, and in an effort to be competitive, priced its version of the Galaxy Tab at $650, $50 more than anyone else. AT&T stores will make it available on November 21st. To be fair, AT&T customers can use the same no-contract 250MB/$15/month and 2GB/$25/month data plans that the company offers for the iPad. However, given that the reviews for the Galaxy Tab have been far from positive (even David Pogue, who perhaps gave it the most glowing major publication review, said that it's too expensive at $599), AT&T's price might not matter all that much.

U.S. Cellular, a regional wireless carrier based in the Chicago area, also announced pricing and availability: $399 for a two-year contract and $599 without contract. Data rates are 200MB/$14.99/month and 5GB/$54.99/month. U.S. Cellular stores will have the Galaxy Tab available for sale on November 19th.

My recommendation is to wait until Google formally releases the Gingerbread version of Android (which will officially support tablets), and Samsung (and others) start shipping tablets with Gingerbread installed early next year.

PR Lesson 101 for Samsung: How to frustrate your audience

Samsung just concluded its U.S. announcement of the Galaxy Tab. The company had hyped the event online, and there was some live-blogging activity. Keep in mind that the Galaxy Tab was announced and demonstrated in detail more than a week ago at IFA in Berlin, and that announcement was widely covered. What the press, bloggers and early adopters were expecting to get from Samsung today were answers to three simple questions:

• Which carriers will sell the Galaxy Tab,
• What price(s) will they sell it at, and
• When will it be available?

Samsung only answered the first question. All four major U.S. carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile) will carry it. The prices will be set by the carriers, and Samsung completely refused to answer any questions about specifics. Not a single carrier spoke at the event. As for availability, all they were willing to say was "before the holidays."

There were only two hardware announcements of note: First, Samsung will sell a (presumably unsubsidized) WiFi-only model in addition to the 3G/WiFi models that the carriers will sell, and second, the Galaxy Tab will not have voice calling capabilities. That's it.

This is PR 101: If you can't answer the questions that your audience is most expecting answers to, don't bother staging the event. When the event dragged on and on without any mention of availability or price, I was afraid that Samsung would do exactly what it ended up doing. It's shifted the burden on answering the key questions to its carriers, who are no doubt thrilled about it.

Samsung should have sent out a press release launching its website and posted videos and specifications of the product, including the video produced by Adobe, instead of having this event. The next time around, when the product is actually ready, far fewer people are going to pay attention to the announcement(s).

Goodbye, Moto?

IDC's numbers for the largest mobile phone global suppliers by volume for the third quarter of 2008 are out, and Motorola has slipped to fourth place, down almost 32% from the same quarter last year. Nokia remains #1, Samsung is #2, and Sony Ericsson, which was once all but given up for dead, has passed Motorola to be #3. LG Electronics is #5 and could pass Motorola soon, and Apple is #6 in shipments and #3 in revenues.

At the same time, Motorola announced that it lost $397 million on $7.5 billion in revenue in the third quarter, and has postponed its plans to spin off its mobile phone business until some time after 2009. They're undoubtedly facing the reality that they won't be able to get any reasonable price for their mobile phone division until the current recession lifts. The only question is whether or not they'll have a viable business to spin off by that time.