The idea is, you sign a two-year contract for a data plan, and AT&T will heavily subsidize the cost of a cell-connected laptop. So what’s the catch? Well, since AT&T’s data plans start at $40 a month, you could look at these laptops as actually costing a minimum of $960 before taxes — when the cheapest of them can be had for around $300 at retail. Of course, that $300 doesn’t include internet access from anywhere a cell signal reaches, so it’s not like that extra $600 is completely wasted.

It’s important to note the restrictions of the plan, though: That $40 plan allows you to transfer only 200 Megabytes of data, which is very limited. If you plan to do anything more than check e-mail, you’re going to eat up 200 MB very quickly. The other data plan is a more reasonable 5 Gigabytes — but it also costs $20 more per month.

What about you — would you find this sort of setup useful?

[Read - via Liliputing]

The Mini 10 retails for about $450, a price that you can expect to come down fairly quickly as more and more netbooks hit store shelves.

Wondering what the big deal is about these little laptops? We’ll have an in-depth look at the phenomenon in the near future.

[Read]