Here’s a quick update from AT&T on the state of their netbook offerings this afternoon in case you’re interested. AT&T stores will now be carrying the Acer Aspire One (160GB HDD/1GB RAM), Dell Inspiron Mini 10 (160GB HDD/1GB RAM) and the Lenovo S10 (160GB HDD/1GB RAM). All three netbooks will retail for $200 after a MIR and a two-year service contract.

Data plans for the netbooks are as follows: 200MB for $40/month, 5GB for $60/month. AT&T is also offering three tiers of ConnecTech services for your brand new netbook.

We all hope that eventually AT&T will get things together and out a tethering plan for the iPhone. But most of us are also nervous what AT&T is going to charge. We’ve heard everything from $40 to $60, but now one site is stating that AT&T told them directly all the details. We’re doubtful but wouldn’t be surprise if the cost ends up being close to what this site is stating.

Ladies and germs! If you’re an AT&T Broadband customer you should know that your ISP is shutting off access to Usenet at the end of the month. Why? Yup, it’s related to that whole smear campaign from last year. Some nonsense about illegal content that may or may not be there. Anyway, Giganews has a little sale for you guys: 50 percent off three months of the Diamond Plan and 20 percent off other Giganews plans.

For the last few weeks it hasn’t been unusual to see AT&T among Twitter’s trending topics — following its disappointing performance at WWDC and the activation issues with the iPhone last week, the carrier hasn’t exactly been garnering positive reactions from its legions of Twitter-using members. Today, it’s reached the top spot on Twitter once again, and, once again, AT&T is the target of waves of contempt.

The source of the recent flurry of AT&T tweets is Adam Savage of MythBusters fame, who tweets that for “a few hours of web surfing in Canada” he was charged a whopping $11,000.

Look at AT&T, using the new social network Facebook to break news. How cute! The news: rumors of a $55 tethering plan are false. AT&T didn’t reveal, or even hint at, the actual price, so we’re left to speculate for a little while longer.

Gruber found some information that the AT&T tethering plan would cost $55 a month and suggests – but cannot confirm – that this will be in addition to the unlimited data plan already in place, potentially hitting the $85 per month for data. I, like him, find this outrageous and can only pray that this number will be more like $55 total.

On the aggregate, traffic on wireless networks is fairly low. Major carriers built out quite a bit of bandwidth – they just needed the right customers, applications, and phones to use it correctly. When I was a telecom consultant back in 1999 we were already talking about 3G but no one wanted to start up the pipe for fear of – what? I don’t know. Maybe they were afraid people would use it, downloading WAP pages willy-nilly.

Can great things get better? Sure they can! We’ve loved the Nokia E71 for nigh on a year when we ran a review in October describing it thusly:

This phone is a magnificent piece of work. Everything about it screams “quality” from the texture of the keys to the styling and heft. Everyone I saw, be they users of iPhones, BlackBerries, flip phones or what have you, everyone thought it was a beautiful piece of hardware. It’s well constructed, uses a fair amount of real metal, and has a weightiness to it that seems out of keeping with its slight frame. And it is slight: it’s nearly as thin as my old Samsung Trace, and it’s narrower than a BlackBerry.

We’re trying to get through all of this Apple iPhone related news as fast as possible so just bear with us.

To start, AT&T will offer tethering, but there’s no official announcement on that just yet.

On the MMS front, AT&T will offer MMS on the iPhone 3G S later this summer once system upgrades have been completed. These upgrades are unrelated to the 3G network, says AT&T.

A few questions remain unanswered and we’ll update as we get the answers.

So you want a BlackBerry on AT&T, but not the Bold. We get it; the Bold is a bit expensive, a bit chunky, and seriously – who really needs three Gs? You’d be perfectly fine with one or two Gs, but no one seems to offer that. If that sounds like you, you should be set come Friday. On May 22nd, AT&T will be releasing the slightly less portly, slightly less expensive, and significantly less 3G’d BlackBerry Curve 8900.

AT&T has announced that it’ll expand its subsidized netbook + home internet service packages that it’s been trying out in Atlanta and Philadelphia for the past few months. Starting sometime this summer, you’ll be able to package AT&T DSL with a 3G-enabled netbook from the likes of Acer, Dell, and HP for a (presumably) discounted monthly fee.

Just announced by AT&T and Samsung, the Jack will be available on May 19th for $99 with a new contract and after rebate. If the device looks familiar it’s no coincidence. The Jack is basically the BlackJack III. The Windows Mobile 6.1 device comes equipped with a 3.2-megapixel camera, aGPS, 3G and Wi-Fi. Hit the jump for the full release and a video unboxing by the AT&T goons.

I pity the poor rural cellphone owner. First Verizon snapped up Alltel and something called Rural Cellular and now AT&T grabbed those 1.5 million subscribers in a $2.35 billion deal.

According to Cote Collaborative, AT&T is pondering a price cut on monthly service charges for iPhone owners when Apple will purportedly announce new hardware at WWDC in June.

Apparently Apple and AT&T are under enormous amounts of pressure to sell more iPhones and there’s a “strong possibility” of a $10/month discount on the entry-level $69 plan. If this is true then the overall discount on a two-year contract amounts to $240.

Some analysts have said the obvious and informed the world that the iPhone won’t be on one carrier for much longer. Why? Because Apple will ravage AT&T until it is a dark husk fill with bile and sputum, take as many customers wishing to use GSM and AT&T coverage as possible, and then move on like the chitinous, swart beasts from The Dark Crystal. And that’s the upside.

What was once rumored is now fact. AT&T will indeed get the BlackBerry Curve 8900 sometime in the “early summer.” The price still hasn’t been revealed, but it can’t be much more than what other BlackBerrys go for.

If you’re taking the original Palm Eos story with a grain of salt, you’re going to want to find another, slightly smaller grain for this one.

During its earnings reports today, AT&T posted numbers that easily beat Wall Street’s expectations. Yes, profits were down, but we’re in a down economy, and there’s simply no denying that things would have been much, much worse without the iPhone.

First of all, AT&T announced that it had a net gain of 1.2 million subscribers for the quarter. That’s solid, but guess why? It also announced that it had gained 1.6 million new iPhone activations. Some of those were existing customers, but 40 percent of them were new to AT&T. Without the iPhone it seems fairly likely that AT&T may have lost customers for the quarter. It certainly wouldn’t have gained over 600,000 new iPhone ones, and given the numbers, you can imagine that a good number of existing customers would have left had they not upgraded to the iPhone.

Need an iPhone? ‘course you do. Why not spend $50 less than the 8GB model and pick up a refurbished 16GB instead. Sure, there is a new iPhone coming this summer, but $149 is a heck of a price for the 16GB model. Plus, the current generation will get the iPhone 3.0 software eventually anyway.

Oh, patents. They’re fun for about two minutes, then you realize that companies file patents for every cockamamy idea that R&D devises. (Also, to receive a patent, you don’t even have to prove that your idea actually works, which I learned while reading Michio Kaku’s book. It’s a nice thing to know when you see a product advertised on TV as holding U.S. patents numbers 12345 or whatever—they hand out patent like old ladies hand out candy corn on Halloween.) But to the point: Apple filed a patent that shows a front-facing camera on the iPhone. Such a camera would make video calls a possibility. Get excited.