On Thursday, the retail store Radio Shack announced that the $99 Acer Aspire One is on sale in all the company’s 4,400 stores. The offer is available through 24th December.

Yet, according to a press release of Radio Shack, the $99 netbook is only available with a compliant 2-year contract from AT&T Wireless. The contract provides 3G high-speed wireless connection and it has a monthly fee of at least $60. This includes 5GB of transferred data; the extra data transferred is charged with $0.0005 per KB. This is the first time a netbook is offered with a bundled 3G connection in the U.S, even though, in Europe, T-Mobile has been offering the same netbook for quite some time.

The $99 price tag may be appealing for many people, but it’s worth mentioning that the total costs of the netbook and the monthly fees are hefty, at $1,540. Yet, a recent review of ComputerWorld reported that AT&T’s 3G connection was faster and more stable than its competitors’, ranging from 60KB/s upload speed to 94KB/s download speed.

The $99 Acer Aspire One will have a 8.9 inch LCD TFT screen, 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB RAM, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi card, 160GB hard drive and it will have Windows XP on it. The Aspire One is one of the most popular netbooks, having a 38.5% market share. The netbook’s price tag without the AT&T wireless service plan is $499 at Radio Shack, even though there are also many other retailers that sell the Aspire One for less than $400.