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.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for trying to appeal to th' geeks, but we are awarrrrrrrgggg!!!! of your marketing ploys.
 
Thank you,
The undersigned.

Droid + iPad bundle opportunity

[Orga]

Could hook the iPad up with free wifi tethering from my rooted droid on Verizon!

Nothing you cannot already get.

[bigredradio]

You can already buy the iPad. You can already get a MiFi device and connect them. The only news here is that they are available at the same store. I was starting to jump for joy until I realized that it was not a Verizon network capable iPad. Maybe next year.

Summary Correction: Sprint's 3g footprint

[exabrial]

I think you mean Sprint's 4G footprint. Sprint has 3G coast-to-coast like Verizon does (They often share the same towers). AT&T has a city-central 3g network and 2g technology everywhere else.

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:1gb/month

[Pojut]

It is also worth noting that millions of people bought music from Clay Aiken, Sean Paul, and Creed.

A fool and his money...

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/ [apple.com]

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

[voidptr]

The WiFi + 3G version has an actual GPS chip in it that works with or without a cell tower in range. "Assisted GPS" means it bootstraps the GPS chip with either WiFi or cell triangulation and time reference to speed up computing the initial GPS solution if they're available, but it is real GPS and works without a cell subscription or if you're not in WiFi or cell coverage.

The GPS chip is built into the 3G chipset though, which is why it's not in the WiFi only version.

I wish they'd add native support for third-party bluetooth GPS pucks to provide Core Location data though.

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:1gb/month

[Anonymous Coward]

> stares at monitor for 10+ hours a day
> claims ipad will burn out his eyes
This needs to die. When did emissive displays start to cause "eyes burn out"? bullshit