AT&T today introduced a GoPhone prepaid offer for tablets.
Customers can bring their own compatible slate, buy an AT&T SIM for $10 and then choose from three data plans.
The plans start at $15/month for 250 MB and jump substantially from there to $30/month for 3 GB and $50/month for 5 GB.
The pricing appears to be similar to the DataConnect Pass offering for prepaid data.
AT&T’s list of eligible bring-your-own tablets includes the Asus K005, Asus Transformer Pad, Google Nexus 7, iPad 3, iPad Mini, Lenovo IdeaTab, Pantech Element as well as the Samsung Galaxy Camera, Galaxy Note 8.0, Galaxy Tab 2 10.1”, Galaxy Tab 3, Galaxy Tab 3 7.0”, and Galaxy Tab 8.9”.
Specifically, eligible tablets are required to support AT&T Multi-band GSM, UMTS and/or LTE Tablet. Bringing over a tablet from another carrier might involve getting that carrier to unlock it and even then AT&T can’t promise all features will work.
The addition of tablet plans to AT&T’s GoPhone brand comes at the carrier recently folded its Aio Wireless brand into Cricket and decided not to bring Aio’s prepaid tablet plans along for the ride. Andy Smoak, vice president of products at New Cricket, said the carrier has seen the connected tablet trend move toward adding those devices into a shared data plan.
