Micro Center and Vonage are offering a promotion that lets you take $250 off the price of any computer over $249 when you sign up for a Vonage phone plan. That includes the Acer Aspire One, which Mico Center carries for $349.99.
Now, this is probably only a good deal if you were thinking about replacing your telephone service with a VoIP plan anyway. But even if you weren’t the deal might be worth checking out. The cheapest Vonage plan is just $14.99 a month for 500 minutes of calls per month. That’s just $180 per year. It’s not clear from the Micro Center web page whether you need to sign up for two years or more, but if you can get away with signing up for the cheap one year plan, you could still pick up an Aspire One and an extra phone line for a year for just $280, which is still $70 off the original price.
The offer is only good in-stores. If anyone figures out whether you can get away with signing up for the cheap plan for a year, let us know in the comments.
via fat wallet and netbook reports
i have to disagree with Chad, I love my Vonage service, along with many many ppl i know. but we have our reason: as Soldiers who deploy overseas, the mobility of Vonage gives us the ability to call our loved ones unlimited minutes for a flat fee per month. now that my wife is working in Canada and i am stationed in Oklahoma, she has the device and calls me everyday. we regularly surpass 2000 minutes a month on the service, and using a cell phone as he suggests would cost us hundreds if not thousands of dollars. it is a godsend when the other alternative is AT&T’s butt raping phone cards that the military hawks at us.
that said, there are lower cost alternatives now. Skype at $2.95 for unlimited US and Canadian calls comes to mind. A phone of choice + adapter ($20-$75) + 12 months of Skype (12×2.95=$36) can conceivably keep you below $100 for a whole yr! I’ll take that over Vonage or Ooma, which lock you into their expensive hardware or gateway. My only concern right now, which I need to test out and is holding me back from ending my Vonage subscription, is whether my Skype account will work in Canada as well when I travel there (quite often). Anyone know if my Skype account will work exactly the same whether I am in the US or Canada?
Other than that, Vonage and Skype has the approval of thousands of Army grunts!
At least this means some sort of a phone provider in the US is subsidizing netbooks, and netbook awareness is increasing a little. (Although it’s just for phone service and not full broadband internet use.) Maybe the cell phone providers will take notice and get involved. Does anyone know of a US cell service provider that deals with netbooks?
Most US cell providers now offer PC Card, ExpressCard, or USB 3G modems for use with whatever notebook you already have. Some of these are free with rebate. They also let you sign up for data service through, for example, Dell, when you purchase a laptop supplied with a mini-PCIe card (specific to your provider) and a built-in antenna. Dell claims that this “built in” arrangement provides much better connections than external cards.
I wish US providers would make the jump and start letting us buy our own mini-PCIe cards, whether from them or elsewhere and put them in whatever netbook or notebook we like. I think “build-in-able” or USB-plug-in-able antennae are probably available that would work if necessary.
Eventually fully mobile (with 3, 3.5, or 4G data capability) netbook use will greatly proliferate, when people realize how much more convenient they are than bigger notebooks. Maybe providers will then finally realize that making it difficult for us to use their services, the way we want to, is costing them money.
I used to have Vonage. It’s a two year agreement. That’s just their standard, no specials, agreement. You have to have the Vonage device, their router, to use the service. They charge something like $80 for the router. But they don’t actually charge you for it, unless you drop their service within the first year. If you try to drop their service, (as I did) between one and two years, there is a $49 “disconnect” fee.
There are ways, however, (basically by threatening to leave) to get lower per-month fees. The lowest I was offered was $4.99 a month, but that was inbound calls only. $10.99 was inbound and limited outbound.
Unless things have changed (and I only dropped them 3 months ago, after a little over a year of service), You will end up spending more than the original price of the Acer if you go with this plan, ($99 for the computer + 24*14.99 for Vonage. That’s $99 + 359.76, or $458.76 – and that’s *if* you can do the $14.99 a month to qualify). And if you have a cell phone with a decent amount of minutes, Vonage is useless.
If you need a home-based VOIP phone, then ok, go for it (although, Ooma seems like a much better deal with unlimited calls for at least 5 years – they say forever, but guarentee 5 years for only $249). Or if you have no way of getting credit, and you want to defer payments… But for most people, I’d say stay away from Vonage.