So, I love my iPad, but I have been wanting a Galaxy tablet as well. There are so many apps for Android that will never be available in Steve Jobs-land. I saw that T-Mobile is supposedly selling them starting today, and figured I’d see what there is to be seen.
First off, while the tablet is prominently listed on the t-mobile front page, it’s not actually available for purchase in their system. If you hit the “buy” button, you get taken to a list of available devices that doesn’t include the Galaxy. If you chat with t-mobile support, they say “it’s not in my list either, try again in two hours”. OK, fine, I want it today anyways, I’ll try calling a local t-mobile store. The landline to the Seattle downtown t-mobile store is such terrible quality, crackling with static, I didn’t bother trying to talk to anyone. The store in Lake City doesn’t even bother to answer the phones. I guess they don’t want a sales commission today.
I suppose I’ll just have to walk down to the store at lunchtime.
UPDATE: No one answers the phone at the Lake City T-Mobile store. Lucky me, they do answer the phone at the downtown store, and were willing to hold the 1 they had left for me, if I got there in 30 mins. When I got there, turns out they had not actually saved me one, but no one else had come in asking yet, so all’s well that ends well. They didn’t have any soft cases, only a hard case, which I declined for now. Kinda surprised the sales guy forgot to try and sell me a microSD card. Luckily, the device has 12gb free out of the box, so no worries yet. Annoyingly, the t-mobile.com website while letting you ask for accessories for the device, isn’t properly configured for it yet, and gives back irrelevant results. The connector looks like it would be compatible with the ipod connector, but it’s not. The device comes with DoubleTwist sync software, which automatically starts scanning your iTunes library once installed. Lucky for me it’s not a modal operation, so I was able to test sync a music file and listen to it. It is going to take a really long time to add everything in my library though.
Looks like some apps I have on my android phone are no longer available. A pity, I would have liked to play pac-man on the bigger screen, but even if I wanted to pay for it, NAMCO disappeared it from the store. Maybe there’s a way to sync apps between devices.
UPDATE2: It looks like the phone number they assigned to the device (they are a phone company, and it does support SMS) was recently owned by a bankruptcy lawyer. I just got a message from someone at the U.S. Trustees office calling the lawyer back. I can’t figure out how he managed to leave the message though; when I call the phone number, I get an automated message that says “this subscriber doesn’t accept incoming calls” and then the phone just rings forever. Maybe it’s the last message the lawyer’s phone was supposed to get, and it’s been waiting in cyberspace for who knows how long. Seems like a serious enough issue, I called the trustee back and left him a voicemail to let him know the message didn’t get to who he wanted it to get to.
