London dining buddy and pal Dean Bubley has a very insightful and highly rational piece on why the embedded 3G PC’s won’t sell.
I’m in his court. Instead if the carriers want to really sell data plans they should be working with Asus and others like them who are making and selling this dirt cheap eee PC’s with a data module and 3G ready to go. They are already WiFi enabled, but having one of those babies (I just ordered the 8 gig model) and all cloud based services is the way to go in my book.
I’m actually hoping I can find some Linux drivers for the eeePC that will work with my Sierra Wireless external 3G cards. While this may be overkill, since I have the Flybook which already has onboard 3G/HSDPA that flies and is unlocked (a point Dean makes) the idea of another device may be hard for some to swallow.
But there are times where “always staying connected” without the need for a very expensive PC is there. By combining inexpensive hardware, with services, the carriers will have something to sell. But as Dean points out there’s lots of reasons why that won’t be happening too soon.
Related to this, PhoneBoy points to a report about SIP over 3G being dominant in about 5 years…