(Credit: CNET Australia)
Telstra has teamed up with Acer to add notebooks and laptops to its Next G range of devices, offering these machines on similar monthly contracts it sells mobile phones on.
Breaking away from its current range consisting only of mobile phones and business handhelds, Telstra today announced it would begin offering Acer One notebooks and Acer Aspire laptops with Next G SIM cards embedded. This means the laptops can connect to the Next G network without the need for an external wireless broadband modem.
"Telstra worked with Acer to make sure once a customer has purchased an embedded laptop it was simple and quick to connect to the internet ... allowing them to start surfing the internet straight away," said Glenice Maclellan, Telstra consumer executive director.
Telstra will sell the Acer computers in its T-Life stores for $0-upfront on a $39 per month data plan plus a monthly laptop repayment expense, the cheapest being $30.38 per month. Vodafone entered into a similar partnership with Dell computers last year and is currently selling a Dell Mini 9 notebook with a 5GB monthly data allowance for $59.95 per month.
Saw this in a Melbourne City [T]Life store on the weekend.
I guess if you are happy to go on a plan or buy it outright, then it's quite a nice little package if it's in your price range. Like the article said, it works straight out of the box and I assume a Telstra rep just assigns an account to the sim.
I'm sure however it won't be liked by most ZDNet users due to it a) being Telstra and b) it being considered overpriced. I think that it's definitely going to appeal to a certain demographic within Telstra though, and they could end up doing quite well from this. On the other hand, it could be disastrous. And the poor bigpond call centres will be flooded with cancellation calls.
Will be keeping an eye on this for sure.
Incidentally, I could not find any info on the Bigpond website yet. Interesting.