Notebook with 3G?

Dell Netbook: Bundled with 3G

Posted by Sam Churchill on September 5th, 2008

Dell’s new netbook, the Inspiron Mini 9 ($399), will be sold with built-in mobile broadband by Vodafone for HSPA access in the UK, the companies announced on Thursday.

For now its “in key European markets”. Vodafone is a part owner in Verizon. No announcement of a partnership with U.S. carriers has been announced (yet), but speculation is that cellular carriers may subsidize a Dell netbook, much like they subsidize fancy smartphones (with a two-year service contract).

Dell’s netbook has an Atom processor, 8.9-inch LED display, and an SSD (solid state disk) for storage, holding up to 16G bytes.

Vodafone will start selling the Mini 9 later this month, but has not yet said in which countries it will offer the netbook.

Laptop Magazine has an interview with Dell’s Product Manager John New

Are there plans for adding mobile broadband and do you think the monthly fees need to come down?
We think the mobile broadband capability speaks perfectly for this category so we defined the device with internal capabilities because to have an external dongle on a highly mobile device didn’t make much sense. The carriers are working on options. Right now the industry norm is $55 a month and that is a bit expensive for a low cost device. I think at some point we will see day passes, like you see with hotspot day passes. It is going to be a premium option for this category, however. As adoption continues to grow, hopefully we will see those prices come down.

Do you see carriers subsiding the cost of the hardware? What flavor of mobile broadband options are you exploring?
I can’t really speak to that, but it is our job at Dell to get the technology into our customers hands and speak to the benefits of the technology. We will announce the flavors when we announce the partners.

Will it be WiMax capable?
We aren’t talking to WiMax right now.

Why the decision to only offer solid state drive options?
We are really focusing on high mobility and we are trying to lead here with the solid state disks. Because of there are no moving parts and quiet performance they are really ideal for this type of device. We have a 4, 8 and 16 GB option, but we also have partnered with Box.Net for Internet storage.

The Atom processor is due to upgrading next year. Today’s Atom-branded Diamondville-class processors are based on a Silverthorne architecture. The new 45-nm Pineview processors are expected to arrive in Q3 of 2009. They will be based on a new Lincroft micro-architecture boasting an integrated graphics core and memory manager that connects to memory via DMI, not a FSB.

source : dailywirless.org