Verizon Will Sell iPad+MiFi Bundles, Starting Oct 28th

wiredmikey quotes from today's much-anticipated announcement from Apple that Verizon is joining the iPad club, which means that: "iPad will be available at over 2,000 Verizon Wireless Stores nationwide beginning Thursday, October 28. Verizon Wireless will offer three bundles, all featuring an iPad Wi-Fi model and a Verizon MiFi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot, for a suggested retail price of $629.99 for iPad Wi-Fi 16GB + MiFi, $729.99 for iPad Wi-Fi 32GB + MiFi and $829.99 for iPad Wi-Fi 64GB + MiFi. Verizon Wireless is offering a monthly access plan to iPad customers of up to 1GB of data for just $20 a month. In addition, Verizon Wireless will also offer all three iPad Wi-Fi models on a stand-alone basis." Since the Verizon bundles don't seem to offer the kind of subsidy that many phone purchases do, it would make sense to shop around for the same functionality (Wi-Fi iPad + 3G service) from other carriers. For instance, if you live within Sprint's city-centric 3G footprint, and want more than 1GB of data, Virgin Mobile's branded MiFi offers unlimited transfer (within the limit of the network — it's no FiOS, but I've used it with Skype and Google Voice) for $40/month.

Comments

1gb/month

[pilgrim23]

And with the crisp iPad screen I will be able to download/stream all my favorite movies for.... enter bill shock. The cheap up front, soak them on bandwidth American telecom paradigm needs to needs now.

Re:1gb/month

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to take this opportunity to once again state how much of a rip off a laptop is. I can buy a very capable desktop for less and it will be useful for more than just browsing pictures and watching youtube and running basic applications. Honestly, my Dell Inspiron is just as capable as a laptop for most purposes and costs much less while being a useful gaming machine at the same time.

Re:1gb/month

[nine-times]

I can buy a very capable laptop with 3G capability for less than that

which of those laptops has a high-quality 10" screen, is 0.5" thick, and weighs 1.5 lbs?

my Samsung Epic is just as capable as the iPad

Your Samsung Epic has a small screen.

Here's what you have to understand: it's not about raw computing power, and it's not about being able to hack the kernel. The people who bought iPads are interested in usability for certain specific applications. It's a web-browsing appliance, an ebook reader, a document viewer, a picture browser, a giant iPod, and a bunch of other things. Being the right form-factor is essential. If you don't care about the form-factor and usability features, then you aren't its target audience at all.

Re:1gb/month

[whisper_jeff]

Depends on your needs and desires but things like the Marvel app (and the various other comic apps) makes reading comics a pleasure (no, seriously - this is an absolutely fantastic app and I highly recommend it to any comic fan out there) and the various sketching apps makes doing design brainstorming a breeze (and sending those sketches to clients easier than scanning and emailing), to name but two quick things that a laptop fails at. As a media consumption device, laying in bed, it's better than a smart phone for the screen real estate and better than a laptop for it's size and weight. For a pick-up-and-go computing device, it is superior to a laptop, imho. For a _computer_, it is inferior but I didn't buy it to be a computer. I have a desktop for desktop-y work and I have a laptop for laptop-y work. That said, I still regularly use my desktop but, since getting my ipad, I haven't used my laptop at all...

Suffice it to say there are a ton of other uses but I'm at work and don't feel like writing a long post on the subject... :)

Re:1gb/month

[rockout]

While I share your assessment of those three "artists" and their musical "talent", that doesn't mean that those millions of other people are fools. They just don't share your (or my) taste in music. This goes back to the GP post - just because an iPad isn't for you, doesn't mean it can't fit the needs of millions of other people, who may be "fools" in your opinion, but in the end, that's just your opinion, and it would be supremely arrogant to state it as fact.

The problem with wifi-only iPad

[microbee]

is that it does not have a GPS chip. This makes all the location services not working. Would it work with +myfi?

Somehow Apple did not stress this point in feature difference when it released the iPads. I only found it out a while after I bought the wifi version.

Re:The problem with wifi-only iPad

[Tharsman]

is that it does not have a GPS chip. This makes all the location services not working. Would it work with +myfi?

Somehow Apple did not stress this point in feature difference when it released the iPads. I only found it out a while after I bought the wifi version.

It's in their website. http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/

Location:
* Wi-Fi
* Digital compass
* Assisted GPS (Wi-Fi + 3G model)
* Cellular (Wi-Fi + 3G model)

I was very clear about this when I got my Wi-Fi iPad. It still can point me in the map, exactly points at my apartment in a cramped up community, something I find very scary given the thing has no GPS. Didn't know you could get that much information out of your Wi-Fi alone.

Re:The problem with wifi-only iPad

[tlhIngan]

I don't know where this myth comes from, but the 3G ones DO have a true GPS. Perhaps people think that 'assisted GPS' means 'fake GPS'. Wrong. It just means that the real GPS gets some help from the cellular network to quickly get a first position fix. After that it functions like any other GPS, and without that help it just takes a little longer to get the fix.

Probably because there's actually several different levels of Assisted GPS.

First one would be "fake GPS" where it's really a 1-channel GPS receiver and uses the cell network to provide the missing satellites - usually the cell towers do the computation for you and they know your location. Many "dumbphones" do this (remember when you had to pay for locations eervices?).

Another form would be where the cell tower broadcasts the local GPS information and combined with the received satellite signal, the onboard AGPS chip computes your location. Featurephones often use this variant, and most E911 is done this way as well.

The iPad, iPhone and probably every smartphone out there instead uses this third form which is GPS with network bootstrap. In GPS, the module needs to download some data known as the almanac, which details the location of the satellites in the sky. It's a slow download, which is why a GPS cold start can take easily 15 minutes of solid signal (we're talking a few hundred bits per second). A warm start (the GPS has a moderately recent almanac that it can use immediately, plus knows where it was last) means it just has to acquire the satellites and do the calculations, which can take 15-45 seconds while it updates the almanac data in the background. Of course, if you're attached to the cell network, you suddenly have two more pieces of information - the cell network can provide the current almanac at much faster speeds so cold-starting takes much less time, as well as providing initial GPS data (similar to the second form of AGPS above) so you can get a rough fix in seconds. Without this asssistance, it'll work standalone just fine, but with it, it can get a fix extremely quickly and improve on it as it acquires more satellites on its own. Even cold-starting a GPS is relatively quick if it can grab the almanac this way.

The confusion comes because there's many forms of assistance - from just bootstrapping to letting the cell tower figure it out.

Apple takes it one further as well since CoreLocation uses GPS, but also supports WiFi geolocation (if a connection's available) as well as cell-tower geolocation.

Re:Nothing you cannot already get.

[bsDaemon]

WSJ article a few days ago indicated that Verizon should have the iPhone in early 2011. Assuming that's true, a good indicator that they're moving that direction is having Verizon bundle the iPad. The MyFi device is probably just a temporary measure to get around the GSM-only hardware for cellular data.

Since the iPad doesn't need to make phone calls, using an adapter for cellular data access makes sense. They'll have to make some physical changes to the iPhone to have it actually work on a non-GSM carrier, so it makes sense to take longer moving in that direction, but using the iPad to get people used to the idea of a break in AT&T exclusivity.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it. I actually wouldn't mind an iPhone, but I have no reason at all to want an iPad.

Re:Nothing you cannot already get.

[AndrewNeo]

I'm not really sure how much of a change they would have to make, considering there was an article earlier this year on how someone removed the 3G unit from their iPad and replaced it with the insides of an.. wait, you guessed it, a MiFi. (article) My point being the 3G unit is modular in the iPad (unlike a phone's, which is integrated with the radio which is deeply involved with the phone's operation) and they could probably make a CDMA version.

What constitutes equivalent?

[dazedNconfuzed]

I could sell you a desktop computer powered by a car battery for even less.

Yes, useful form factor costs extra.

Re:LAPtop

[ColdWetDog]

checking email while walking down a hall, reading ebooks in bed, web browsing on the train, games while curled up on the couch, listening to noise-suppressing music at work, checking house prices while driving thru a neighborhood, writing a book in the few-minute gaps between tasks/events, looking up conversation subjects over lunch, making VoIP calls walking to the car, checking traffic & weather when starting the car, trading stocks the moment you hear news of market activity, looking up & ordering books when a friend suggests one, reviewing news over breakfast, finding a suitable nearby restaurant while going out with friends, ... and yes, browsing pictures and watching YouTube -

You might consider upping your Ritalin dose.

The good thing: a no-contract $20 data plan

[Jon_S]

What intrigued me is the no-contract $20 data plan. I got a spot in the boonies that has no DSL or cable access, but can get VZW (but no other carriers). I don't want to spend $60/month for a MiFi device with a 2-yr commitment. If I read the reports right, this comes with a $20 data plan, and no committments, so perhaps one can turn it on an off as needed. Hoepfully I read that right.

Yeah, Yeah, I know - 1 GB/mo. But that's 1 GB/mo. more than what I got now.

So I'm saying I would buy it for the MiFi and the plan, not for the iPad. Of course the money I save would be eaten up by the iPad cost, but I could sell that on e-bay.

Or did I read one of them there internet articles wrong?