Hands On With Samsung’s Galaxy Tablet Computer

PCWorld: Hands On With Samsung’s Galaxy Tablet Computer

The new Android tab will be available from all four major mobile carriers, but none has announced pricing yet.

“We’ve heard a lot of chatter about the coming army of Android tablets, but we haven’t seen any real contenders posing a challenge to Apple’s dominant iPad–until now. Samsung first unveiled the Galaxy Tab at the IFA show in Berlin earlier this month; now, the company has formally introduced the Tab to the U.S. market for all four major wireless carriers (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon). And judging from my initial hands-on with a preproduction Samsung Galaxy Tab, this tablet has the chops to compete with the iPad.

The carriers each already offer a custom branding of Samsung’s Galaxy S family of smartphones. For the Galaxy Tab, Samsung said that it was leaving the pricing and availability announcements to each carrier–and right on cue, all four carriers have issued announcements about their respective devices. So far, none appear to have applied a unique name to the product, referring only to the Samsung Galaxy Tab. None of the carriers discuss pricing or service-plan options in their announcements, either, nor do they discuss availability beyond broad strokes: “holiday” (T-Mobile), “the coming weeks” (Verizon), “the coming months” (AT&T), and “this fall” (Sprint).”