Deal number one from 3 Mobile:

• Free Dongle
• Monthly charge of £17.50
• Usage limit of 1GB a month
• Speeds of up to 7.2 Mb
• Contract length of 24 months (or two years whichever seems less to you!)
• Free laptop – Dell Mini 1012 – with this order.  Getting the free laptop will put you online.  Read the following for information about the laptop with this dongle deal
• Windows 7 featured
• Integrated Intel 950 Graphics Media accelerator
• Up to 8 hours of battery life with this Dell.  Most Dell laptops are pretty good with this and when you’re getting a laptop it’s always good to check the battery life.
• 10 inch HD display screen
• 1GB memory.  This means basically how fast your machine will operate and execute commands.  This is a pretty average size and perfecly reasonable for this size laptop
• 160GB Hard Drive.  This is the amount of information your laptop can hold (storage if you like).
• Intel Atom N450 Processor 91.66Ghz)

So all in all this laptop is pretty good for the price and the length of contract.  I’d say that it’s a good all rounder.  It’s not great for a load of online gaming and stuff like that, but it’s perfect for study and work purposes, web browsing and writing etc.

Deal Number two in a couple of days!

Vodafone have been big in this area for a long time, and now it seems that they and 3 Mobile are in continuous competition with one another.  Let’s look at the next best free laptop dongle deal from Vodafone and see if it’s something you the customer might find useful and satisfying of all your wireless internet needs.

Well, to begin with, if you’ve already read my post on the free laptop dongle deal from 3 Mobile that’s on the top of the market at the moment, then i can tell you that the deal you’re about to see from Vodafone is exactly the same, only the laptop isn’t free!

Now that sounds a little unfair doesn’t it?  And you’re right.  If 3 Mobile can offer you a Compaq Presario CQ61, complete with windows 7 and a free dongle, then why can’t Vodafone?  Well i can imagine that this is just what’s being asked in Vodafone’s boardroom at this very moment.  I would imagine that as soon as 3 Mobile decided to offer the laptop for free, Vodafone called a meeting.

This is what keeps them in second place, and as long as 3 Mobile are offering basically the same service with a free laptop (rather than paying the £59 that Vodafone seem fit to charge) then they will always be second best.  Vodafone need to update their dongle deals if they want to impress us.

There’s no reason to think that you’re not as important as your student, and none of these blog posts are designed to prioritse to student over the everyday user of the laptop and dongle.  But getting back to the point, today i have brought you yet another dongle deal that includes a free laptop.

Staying with 3 Mobile will allow me to identify that the same mobile broadband company can also offer a cheaper deal.  This one is about half the price of the one in the previous post.  In this one you’ll get a Dell Mini 1012 laptop PC worth around £300.  Now this laptop isn’t as good as the other one, but it will certainly do the job well enough without any trouble.  The dongle contract is a little different and you might prefer it if you want to discourage someone from doing so much downloading.  The one i reviewed a couple of days ago was a 5GB allowance (which i would struggle to use) and this one with the Dell is a 1GB allowance.  Now the speed and length of contract is just the same as the more expensive dongle free laptop deal, it’s only the download allowance really that makes all the difference.  So you can have this cheaper deal for £17.50 a month on a 2 year contract; Not bad eh?

You will do your student son or daughter a big favour by giving them access to mobile internet with the use of a dongle.  And the good thing is that this needn’t cost you a fortune.  You can get a dongle for your young learner quite inexpensively, and let’s face it, unless you want to continue paying for the damn thing you’re also going to need to buy something they can eventually take over the payments for aren’t you?

This is the time to start comparing internet dongles and choose one that will suit the student perfectly.  There are many deals out there and there are many different types of students and learners.  If you’re planning on buying them a laptop also for example, you might be interested to know that you can now get free laptops when you sign up to various different dongle packages.  It’s always worth doing a short analysis to find out what they need before you rush out and get what you think.

Another mistake you can make is to get them involved in purchase too much.  They will no doubt tell you that they want the best one out there on the market, perhaps even tell you that their laptop is no good and they need one of the free laptop deals.  I’m not saying that your son or daughter is going to try and con you, i’m merely saying that with young people they often think that the more expensive things are the better things, and this is almost certainly not the case.