Telstra offers up free laptop with Next G

We're all long used to wandering through shopping malls and seeing mobile phone vendors giving away incentives to sign up to mobile phone deals -- aside from the phones themselves, you could be swamped in a veritable sea of Xboxes, iPods and any other digital gizmo besides.

Now Telstra has upped the freebie ante today, with the announcement of a $0 laptop for business customers who sign up to a Next G broadband plan.

That zero dollar figure is perhaps a touch misleading, however. The plan to which it applies costs $99 per month, and the minimum term for the contract is a whopping 36 months.

In effect, you're signing up for a 1GB/7.2Mbps data plan for the next three years, handing over a minimum of $3,564 in the process -- the plan isn't capped, so you could also attract extra data fees -- and getting a laptop with a retail value of $700 for your troubles.

We enquired of Telstra as to make, model and specifications but had yet to receive confirmation at the time of going to press. We'll be bold here and suggest that a $700 laptop might not be very cutting edge. Then again, it might be the 20GB Linux Eee PC 900. Still, will a $700 laptop today be worth much in three year's time? That free Xbox 360 is suddenly starting to look very attractive all over again.