July 07, 2009, 11:34 AM — CDW and AT&T just announced they're bundling a variety of netbooks from HP, Acer, and Panasonic with a two year cellular data network contract. You pay $199 for the netbook and and least $60 per month for the contract.
AT&T is the company that charges folks $0.00048/KB for data transmission after the 5GB limit (do you have a clue how much that translates to for an extra GB? $480). They weren't upfront with that early on, so when customers considered their wireless connection as unlimited, like residential broadband accounts, their bill ran up and up and up. One woman is currently suing because of her $5000 connection charge for one month.
Now, of course, AT&T says they've put the extra charge info more prominently on their Web site, and give customers a chance to check their bandwidth use during the month. It will be interesting to see how the court case comes out, since that information was either totally missing or extremely hard to find when the program started.
Sprint wants in on this act, as you probably read in “Netbooks offered virtually free with mobile contracts.” In this case, the netbook price is $0.99. In other words, couch cushion money. Best Buy is their partner in this program, and they're selling a HP Compaq Mini 110c-1040DX netbook with a 10 inch screen. 1GB of RAM and a 16GB solid state hard disk, as well as 3G mobile broadband for connecting to Sprint's network.
Are these a good deal? As usual, it depends. If you travel all the time, a cellular data network connection pays for itself when you can bypass a hotel Internet charge of $15 per night. However, if you stay connected constantly, you will pay for it. If you check e-mail and do light Web browsing, the 5GB from AT&T will be plenty, but if you're addicted to YouTube or Hulu, you'll pay. Make sure you know how you'll use the device before you jump into one of these contracts.
