How netbook broadband bundles stack up

Vodafone's netbook is the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, which it is offering at £25 per month for a 1GB monthly data allowance, or £30 per month for a 3GB monthly allowance. Going over the allowance will incur an added cost of £15 per gigabyte.

The netbook has an embedded mobile-broadband module. Only two operators offer netbooks with this feature: Vodafone and Orange, with the Asus Eee 901 (detailed on the final page). All the other bundled netbooks come with a USB mobile broadband dongle.

The Mini 9 has an 8.9-inch screen and weighs 1.035kg. It uses Intel's 1.6GHz N270 Atom chipset, runs Windows XP and has a gigabyte of RAM. It also uses an 8GB solid-state drive (SSD), making it one of the only netbooks in the line-up — again, the other is Orange's Eee 901 — that does not use a hard disk drive (HDD).