Looking for last year’s notebook with last year’s 4G wireless technology and don’t mind signing a 2-year contract to get a good price up front? Then has Sprint got a deal for you.
The wireless carrier is selling the Lenovo IdeaPad S205s portable notebook with 3g and 4g WiMAX capabilities for $199.99 when you sign up for 2-year service plan.
The Lenovo IdeaPad S205s features an 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display, a 1.33 GHz Intel Pentium dual core U5600 processor, 2GB of DDR3 memory and a 250GB hard drive. It comes with Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit, offers up to 5 hours of battery life, and weighs about 3.3 pounds.
Lenovo started selling the IdeaPad S205 line of notebooks about a year ago, with prices starting at $499. But the PC maker offers models with AMD E-300 or AMD E-450 processors. Sprint’s model is a bit different thanks to its Intel processor and mobile broadband connectivity.
But the cheapest eligible data plan Spirint offers is 6GB of data for $49.99, which means that over the course of your contract you’ll end up spending $1399.75. So you should probably make sure this is the laptop and wireless data plan you really want.
Sprint’s 4G WiMAX network isn’t available in all regions, but the notebook will switch to slower 3G when needed. Sprint says its WiMAX network offers peak speeds as high as 10 Mbps, but in my experience, 3 to 6 Mbps speeds are more common.
Meanwhile Sprint has already announced plans to build a 4G LTE network to compete with Verizon and AT&T, which is a pretty good sign that the company’s WiMAX network days may be numbered.