What does $49.99 get you? An Acer Aspire One with an 8.9-inch display, 1GB of memory, and a 160GB hard drive. A quality netbook, certainly, but the catch is that you have to sign a two-year deal for AT&T's Internet at Home & On the Go service, which starts at $59.95 a month. My gripe with this plan is that its home service is DSL at a poky 768Kbps. Besides, if my netbook has built-it 3G mobile broadband, why should I bother with DSL at all?
The package also includes 3G wireless, but the monthly data limit is just 200MB -- fine for occasional remote access, but not enough for full-time use. Need more 3G? You can upgrade to a two-year DataConnect plan, which ups the monthly data cap to a healthy 5GB. Ah, but doing so doubles the Aspire One's price to $99.99. (Each plan also includes wireless access at AT&T's thousands of Wi-Fi hotspots.)
AT&T sells the Aspire One with no plan for $449.99, and it has similar subsidized plans for other netbooks. The Dell Mini 9, for instance, starts at $99.99. At the high end, a Lenovo Thinkpad X200 starts at $749.99.
The move to cellphone-style pricing for netbooks has been in the works for some time. Radio Shack already offers a $100 Aspire One with a two-year mobile broadband plan, and Verizon is reportedly working on similar deals.
So will your next computer come from your wireless provider?