The Boy Genius Report claims it has received “firm confirmation” that the HP Mini 1151NR netbook has started arriving in stores and will sell for the discounted price of $199 if the customer signs up for two years of Verizon Wireless Broadband. I couldn’t find the 115NR on HP’s site so it may a model unique to Verizon although Boy Genius didn’t say which stores where the mobile broadband unit is showing up. Launch of the unit with mobile broadband is slated for May 17 or next Sunday. Boy Genius did not identify its sources.
My Verizon PR contact would not confirm the report. “We don’t respond to rumors and as soon as we have news share, we certainly will pass it along to you,” she said.
Such rumors often prove to be in error. A report last week said an Acer Aspire One discounted with two year’s activation of AT&T mobile broadband would start showing up in Costco stores today. As of now, such a deal had not shown up on the web site except its $350 Acer Aspire One without mobile broadband. An administrative person at my store in Danvers, Mass. (which has a manned Verizon kiosk, by the way) said no netbook-mobile broadband bundle had appeared in her store today. “I have not seen anything like at all.” Nor was there any such announcement at Costco Corporate press release web site.
If true, the Verizon-HP bundle is more a story about a bigger discount for netbooks with mobile broadband than HP’s and Verizon’s first joint netbook offering. HP is already selling the Mini 1000 Mobile Broadband WWAN Series for $429.99 with built-in wireless broadband radio modem with a $100 debit card for agreeing to two year’s activation of the Verizon service. The new bundle would seem to increase the netbook discount to $230 (or $350 if the customer goes with HP-s recommended WAN Series configuration at $550).
It’s still unclear what’s in the 115NR model, exactly, but the differences in the WWAN Series are slight – 8.9 or 10.1 inch display, 512KB or 1GB memory and three tiers of storage – one 80GB hard disk and 16 and 32 BG flash options. I did locate a 1110NR and 1120NR both with mobile broadband so possibly the 1i51NR is some approximation of those two models.
