eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Samsung certainly knows how to keep the device news coming. Three months after the company introduced its flagship Galaxy S5 smartphone in four colors, the elusive Gold version will finally arrive in the United States on the Sprint and T-Mobile networks May 30.
Three months may be just long enough for most people to have forgotten that on the day of the GS5’s introduction, the Gold version was near-instantly dubbed “the Band-Aid phone,” for its rather gentle, more-taupe-than-brassy-gold hue and its pillowy and perforated back fabric.
However, where some may see a medicinal hue, others (T-Mobile, to be exact) may see a “shimmering, metallic gold” beauty that will enable users to “show off their rebel style” and will arrive “just in time for summer.”
T-Mobile will sell the GS5 for no money down and 24 payments of $27.50.
Sprint, similarly, requires no money down and 24 payments of $27.09. Those who purchase and activate the phone through Sprint Web sales or telesales will receive a Gold Samsung HM1900 Bluetooth headset (which has a retail value of $40) for no additional charge.
The GS5, as has been lengthily discussed by now, features a 5.1-inch Full HD Super AMOLED display, a 16-megapixel back camera, a 2-megapixel front camera, a heart rate monitor, a pedometer, a fingerprint reader and access to HD Voice technology, where available. It’s dust- and water-resistant, features impressive energy-conservation features (a phone at 10 percent battery life can reportedly be made to hang on for another 24 hours) and can bond WiFi with LTE for super-fast download speed.
These features are joined by a Samsung-length list of others (which is to say, more features than any one person could anticipate or likely use).
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition
Keeping the Samsung love going, and furthering its tablet mission, T-Mobile has also announced that it’s now accepting online preorders for the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 edition.
The Note 10.1 comes with an S-Pen, which offers “the comfort of a pen and the control of a mouse,” per T-Mobile, plus the ability to view and use two applications side by side.
As with other tablets, users can add the newest Note to a Simple Choice plan at no additional charge and enjoy 1.2GB of free LTE-speed data each month through the end of 2014—and forever after that a free 200MB a month of high-speed data.
T-Mobile, which added more new subscribers during the first quarter of 2014 than all of its larger rivals combined, doesn’t yet have much of a tablet market and has insisted that not only is it just getting started but it wants to break consumers’ habit of purchasing WiFi-only tablets.
In addition to its October 2013 offer of 200MB of free high-speed data for life, in April it lowered the price of its LTE-enabled tablets to that of their WiFi-enabled counterparts, and on May 19 it announced that, via Walmart, it’s now offering even lower-priced tablets. A 4G-enabled tablet with a 7.85-inch HP display from Apollo Brands is just $179, and in June Walmart will begin selling the HP Slate 7 HD for $229.
“Our Tablet Freedom efforts,” Jason Young, T-Mobile’s senior vice president of product marketing, said in a May 21 statement, “is a full-on assault against those restrictions that keep tablet owners from experiencing life beyond the WiFi zone.”