Verizon, AT&T put Samsung's Galaxy Note II on pre-sale for $300 with a two-year contract
Samsung's Galaxy Note II played coy at first by only hanging out with the European crowd, but now that it's here, it's the life of the US carrier party. The two biggest, AT&T and Verizon …
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung's Note line has had a rocky history with Verizon: the carrier declined to carry the original Galaxy S II phablet-class hardware in 2011 (skipping the Galaxy S II entirely), then came back to Samsung for the summer's Galaxy S III preorder run at $199.99. Now Verizon and AT&T are both taking the larger-screened Note II at $300 on contract — a $100 premium over the S III's launch price and a signal that big screens command their own pricing tier.
The breadth of pickup is itself telling: eight outlets including The Verge, BGR, Droid Life and SlashGear ran the pre-sale news on or about October 25, 2012, reflecting how much attention the Europe-first phablet's US arrival drew heading into the holiday quarter.
First-order effects
- AT&T and Verizon now compete head-to-head for the same Samsung flagship at an identical $300-on-contract price, with neither able to differentiate on cost — leaving network, availability timing, and bundles as the selling points.
- Verizon's participation marks a reversal from its 2011 stance of sitting out Samsung's large-screen phones, giving the Note II a two-carrier footprint its predecessor never had in the US.
Second-order effects
- Rival handsets launching into the same window — notably AT&T's heavily promoted Nokia Lumia 920, whose training materials leaked this month amid reports of a six-month exclusive — now compete against a Samsung device carrying far more pre-launch buzz.
- A $300 subsidized price point pressures the rest of the market: any carrier wanting a comparable large-screen offering must either match the premium tier or concede the high-margin phablet segment to the two biggest carriers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the Note II cements the 'phablet' as a permanent premium tier in US carrier lineups rather than a novelty — one that later Note launches would price even further above standard flagships.
- Sustained $300-plus subsidized pricing reinforces the two-year-contract model as the mechanism that lets carriers sell ever-more-expensive hardware while keeping headline prices low, delaying the shift toward full retail pricing.
The trend: Large-screen phones are graduating from curiosity to premium flagship tier in the US market, with carriers using two-year subsidies to absorb rising device prices.