AT&T dishes on retail strategy, 3G iPhone, Android and more: Touchscreen table to wow shoppers

AT&T Mobility hopes a new 30-inch touchscreen table will lead to more customers leaving its stores educated and satisfied with the entire shopping experience — a little fun and simplicity wouldn’t hurt either.
The nation’s largest carrier will be installing Microsoft Corp.’s Surface at a dozen stores in four cities in a few weeks to test out the display that allows customers to interact with devices, content, rate plans and accessories by multi-touch.
“When I saw the technology, a light bulb went off,” AT&T Mobility President and CEO Ralph de la Vega said at a press briefing Wednesday afternoon. “To me it was an absolute wow.”
The companies demonstrated how the technology works by placing a Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. Blackjack II on the display, which quickly recognized the device and pulled up various tables of specifications, features, colors, plans and accessories. Then a Research in Motion Ltd. BlackBerry Curve was also placed on the display to demo the multi-user screen technology at work – comparison pages quickly pulled up indicating the feature sets and capabilities of both devices.
Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft Corp.’s entertainment and devices division, said the Surface technology rose from a small team of 10 that the company set apart from the rest of the company to operate essentially as a startup tasked with developing new experiences from devices. Five years later, Surface reached the — wait for it — surface.
Equating the experience to a “virtual trip of our store,” de la Vega said AT&T’s initial use of Surface is just the beginning. He pointed to future variations that might include provisioning software that could make it a complete one-stop shopping experience.
Moreover, AT&T Mobility has a demo in-house that will allow customers to place their old device and new device side-by-side on the table to simply swap all of their content over.
“That’s the kind of thing that excites me. This is just the beginning,” de la Vega said. “Today we make it too painful for you to change devices.”
The new product and technology will be in use at stores in New York City, Atlanta, San Antonio and San Francisco starting April 17. Expansion plans for the rest of its company-owned stores will be based on the success of the pilot program.
MediaFLO update
AT&T also released more details about its AT&T Mobile TV with FLO service, which it plans to launch sometime next month.
Following up on the announcement that Sony Pictures Television will be providing older movies on an exclusive channel called PIX, the carrier said CNN Mobile will be its second exclusive channel.
The carrier said the service will sell for $15, matching Verizon Wireless’ offering. Finally, pricing was announced for the pair of devices set for launch. LG Electronics Co. Ltd. Vu will sell for $300 and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s Access will sell for $200.
Android
While at first glance, de la Vega admits he wasn’t sure how open Google Inc.’s forthcoming Android operating system would be, he’s convinced the carrier will eventually launch devices using the new OS.
“I like it more than I did before,” he said.
3G iPhone coming “in months?”
Finally, de la Vega said its entire portfolio of smartphones will be 3G capable “within months.” When pressed as to whether that shift would include Apple Inc.’s iPhone in addition to BlackBerry devices, he simply reiterated the same statement — all of the carriers’ smartphones will be 3G capable in months.