While mobile broadband dongles are undoubtedly well-matched with netbooks, most mobile broadband firms offer third-party netbooks with their respective dongle deals: T-Mobile bundles its dongle with an Eee PC 904HD, Vodafone entices customers with a Samsung NC10 and Orange lets prospective buyers choose between HP, Asus, Samsung and Toshiba models.

Virgin Media, meanwhile, is the first mobile broadband company to release its own netbook and, while it’s undoubtedly very similar to Zoostorm’s offering – even sharing the same name, the ambitious “Freedom”, – it’s an interesting move and a good-looking product.

We eased back the lid, for instance, to find an edge-to-edge screen and glossy finish that instantly makes the Freedom look like a far classier affair than plenty of the slightly staid netbooks that we’re used to seeing, and the keyboard feels good, too, offering decent size and travel. We’re not sure if it can yet match up to the charms of the Labs-winning Samsung N110, but it certainly felt comfortable enough to use for extended typing sessions.

The trackpad also felt good, with the pad itself proving nippy and responsive and the pair of buttons – which we always like to see instead of a single rocker – felt light and supremely clicky. Build quality was also solid, with the screen exhibiting no more flex than is to be expected and both keyboard and wrist-rest feeling resilient.

Inside, it’s typical netbook fare, with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and 1GB of RAM promising to deliver entirely average benchmark results, and the 120GB hard disk providing plenty of storage. The included draft-n wireless is a nice touch but, in a slightly strange move from a mobile broadband company, there’s no in-built SIM slot, which is perhaps a fault in Zoostorm’s design rather than Virgin Media’s.

Instead, the Freedom is bundled with a Virgin Media mobile broadband dongle and, as is now the norm with mobile broadband deals, is offered for free when you sign up to a contract. In this case, deals start from £31 a month and include 10MB broadband and a landline phone, with the more expensive packages – costing £45 and £58 per month respectively – including faster broadband, more generous call packages and Virgin TV.

This raises the usual question, of course, of price: sign up for the cheapest 24-month tariff and you’ll be shelling out £744 over the course of the contract for this “free” netbook and, while this does include the price of the included TV, internet and phone packages, you’ll have to weigh up the pros and cons of the various deals offered by Virgin and its competitors: while T-Mobile doesn’t offer TV or phone access, for instance, its tariffs start at a mere £20 a month.

It’s also worth considering if it’ll be cheaper to just buy a USB dongle on its own and use that with your laptop instead, especially if you don’t necessarily need the extras that are included with Virgin’s various deals.

Our other major concern is battery life. The Freedom comes complete with a 3-cell battery that, it’s quoted, will last for two and a half hours – but, when the £304 Samsung N110 will last for more than eleven hours on a single charge, that’s not good enough. We’ll be sure to give the Freedom a thorough test in the PC Pro Labs but, suffice to say, we’re not expecting great longevity.

It seems to have the fundamentals nailed down pretty well, but there are still several question marks over the Freedom’s pricing structure and battery life. Suffice to say, the full picture will be revealed soon enough in the PC Pro review.