Holy cow AT&T, another announcement? While most of the other national wireless carriers have opted to save some news for later on, AT&T keeps pushing out releases like it’s going out of style.
Anyway, in addition to heavily pushing Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 handsets, the carrier has also announced that it will carry a pair of Windows 8 tablets — the Asus VivoTab RT and Samsung’s ATIV Smart PC — in time for the holiday rush.
Samsung’s ATIV Smart PC is the more familiar of the two since the Korean company made a point of showing it off at its big London press event earlier this year, but here’s a quick recap in case you missed Samsung’s spectacle. The ATIV sports a 11.6-inch HD display, while a 1.5GHz Intel Clover Trail processor and 64GB of internal storage help keep things ticking along. Interestingly, AT&T doesn’t specify whether or not the ATIV is set up for LTE, though it does play the availability of a keyboard-toting docking system to please those productivity fiends among you.
That said, AT&T is quick to crown Asus’ VivoTab the “first quad-core Windows RT 4G LTE tablet,” and it’s (perhaps obviously) the less hefty of the two. Smaller though it may be, the VivoTab (ugh, really?) runs with a more standard 10.1-inch Super IPS display, only 32 GB of storage, and one of NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 chipsets.
As usual, there’s no word yet on pricing, but AT&T stopped subsidizing its tablets back in August so don’t expect to be able to sign a contract and walk out with the cheap tablet. AT&T is playing the availability card close to its chest as well, but the smart money is on seeing them sooner rather than later.