AT&T's new phone only $550 on prepaid

The cell phone industry is abuzz this morning with AT&T’s new offering. Normally, we’d hold off on news like this, since it’s one of those heavily subsidized phones — to the tune of $150 for a two-year service agreement. However, we’d be remiss to neglect this device. It’s the Tilt, and people are starting to really talk about it, despite the price. We’ll share some specs after the jump.

Designed for a business-minded PC crowd, the Tilt features a full slide-out keyboard, a tiltable 2.8-inch screen, GPS navigation software and the capability to display images and text just as they would look on a Windows PC. “It allows someone who’s traveling to pull out a real PowerPoint or Word document and work within the application,” AT&T spokeswoman April Borlinghaus said.

So AT&T is trying to horn in on Research In Motion’s territory, eh? It does make sense on some level: Tilt for work, iPhone for play…though we doubt anyone would buy both devices. They’re just serving two distinct markets now. Parents can have their business-minded Tilt, while their kids can have their fancy-pants iPhone. And yes it has GPS and WiFi, so it’s basically on even ground with the BlackBerry 8820, which was just released on AT&T. However, the difference is that instead of running on RIM’s operating system, this one runs on Windows. The interface will be very familiar to business people, whether they have previously been using smart phones or not. If we didn’t hate AT&T, if the price wasn’t $550 without a contract, and if we weren’t devout Mac users, we might actually consider buying this puppy. [Express-News] ]]>