UK mobile operator Orange has joined the ranks of high street retailers such as the Carphone Warehouse by bundling a laptop with its mobile broadband offering.

Over the weekend, Orange unveiled the first machine to be offered as part of its ‘connected’ range, available from Orange shops.

Consumers can now purchase a package consisting of Orange’s Internet Everywhere mobile broadband service and dongle and an Asus Eee PC 900 laptop for £25 a month on a 24 month contract. This comes in a £10 more per month than the broadband service alone, so over the contract period consumers pay something close to retail price for the laptop.

Asus made waves with the Eee PC 900’s predecessor, which set the bar for ultra portable and ultra cheap notebooks. After fixing some of the glitches with the earlier model the Eee 900 won yet more acclaim, with an 8.9″ compact design and weight off just less than a kilo, sporting a 16GB flash drive with Windows XP and 1GB of memory.

The service includes 3GB of usage and 100 bundled text messages and Orange claims connection speeds off up to 1.8Mbps.