Hong Kong telecom SmarTone Vodafone is introducing a 10 inch netbook called the Vitesse that will be available for free to customers that sign up for a 2 year wireless broadband service plan.

The netbook sports a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel glossy display, 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 16GB SSD. It also has a 7.2Mbps HSPA module, 802.11b/g WiFi, and a pretty wimpy sounding 3 cell, 1800maH battery. On the bright side, it weighs just 2.15 pounds and measures just 0.9 inches thick.

As Portable Monkey points out, this netbook appears to be a rebranded Onkyo Sotec C204.

You can find out more at UMPC Fever or the SmarTone Vodafone product page.

The Onkyo Sotec C204 netbook probably isn’t going to be sold outside of Japan anytime soon, so the fact that Portable Monkey kind of hates this netbook is mostly academic for me. But for those of you living in Japan, it sounds like you might want to steer clear of this machine.

It’s thin and light, weighing just 930 grams or just over 2 pounds. But it has a disturbingly slow SSD with write speeds that make the netbook a pain to use. The keyboard is cramped. The fan is noisy. And the battery only runs for 2 to 2.5 hours.

You can check out Portable Monkey’s video overview after the break.

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