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]