AT&T Galaxy S4 pre-order is available on April 16 for $249

We’ve seen it, some of us have touched it, and now everyone is just waiting to know when we can hold our very own Samsung Galaxy S4. T-Mobile says May 1, but if you’re not a fan of the Magenta network you can grab a pre-order from AT&T soon.

While Samsung’s Galaxy S4 launch event left everyone with a pretty good understanding of the phone itself, there was very little known about the carriers that would be picking up the phone and serving it to us. We know that the radio in the phone connects to all of the existing US frequencies, so it was going to exist on all four major carriers with no problem. Since there’s three different storage sizes to the phone, it’s assumed that the phone will exist in three different price points, but no one really knows what they are yet. The phone itself can be pre-ordered from places like Carphone Warehouse, but those prices include a bit for the company hosting the pre-order. Besides, most people will be picking the phone up on subsidy from a carrier. AT&T’s pre-order page has the Galaxy S4 listed at $249 on a new contract.

Compared to T-Mobile’s $99 price point for the same phone, AT&T’s variant of the phone seems a little steep. We don’t know which storage size the pre-order is for yet, but in the past the 16GB model was available in stores with the 32GB model available online. If the pre-order is for the 16GB Galaxy S4, AT&T will have a hard time defending attacks from the $150 cheaper T-Mobile, especially when $200 is the standard for new phones on a 2-year agreement. Alternatively, if this is the 32GB model, with the 16GB model available for $200, AT&T will be in a pretty good position competitively.

April 16 is the start of pre-orders for the Galaxy S4 on AT&T, but their website has a place where you can drop off your email address as a reminder. Based on the pre-order date, it seems likely that the AT&T variant of the S4 will also be available right at the beginning of May. With the Galaxy S3 launch, not every carrier released the phone on the same day due to excessive pre-order demand. If that happens again this year, it would only further lend credence to the notion that Samsung is going to dominate the smartphone market in 2013.