In line with their “Un-carrier” moves, T-Mobile made a pretty interesting announcement on Monday, May 19. On Monday, T-Mobile announced a new partnership with Walmart. As per the partnership, T-Mobile “is now offering two new cellular-enabled tablets, together with up to 200MB of free 4G data every month for the life of that tablet, at participating Walmart stores nationwide.”¹ This moves makes a lot of sense.  Doug Chartier, a senior vice president for T-Mobile, pointed out the reasoning behind the move:

The vast majority of tablet owners today are trapped in the Wi-Fi zone…First there’s the extra cost of a cellular-enabled tablet. Then there’s the added cost of the big three carriers’ expensive data plans and the danger of overages. It doesn’t have to be this way. With these great connected tablets, you get free 4G data for the life of your tablet on the blazing fast T-Mobile network – and the freedom to live your life beyond the Wi-Fi zone – at an unheard of price.²

On the surface, 200MB is not an awful lot of data. However, the great majority of tablet users are never very far from Wi-fi. 200MB is just enough to use as a stop gap, say while looking for directions, or checking an email. The two tablets that T-Mobile is furnishing with the free data are not too shabby either.

The Trio AXS (pictured above on the right) is a decent, entry level tablet. Priced at $179, the tablet includes “is a 4G Android-powered tablet with a 7.85″ HD display, 16GB on-device storage, two-camera vision, MicroSD slot, quad core 1.2GHz processor and 1 GB memory.”³ The second T-Mobile powered tablet is the HP Slate 7 HD. The Slate 7 will hit Walmart stores in June for $229 and includes: “Google Play, multi-touch HD wide-angle viewing, 16 GB on-device storage, two-camera vision, MicroSD slot, and 1GB memory.”⁴