The mobile phone industry is booming and today you can walk into any mobile service provider's retail store and find all manner of smartphones and basic cell phones being offered at subsidized prices. The practice is the industry norm for mobile phones. What isn't that common in the U.S. at this point are notebooks and netbooks offered with subsidized prices in exchange for contracts and mobile broadband.

Subsidizing netbooks and notebook in Europe is a very common practice, but so far in America only RadioShack and AT&T are offering a subsidized netbook with the Acer Aspire One going for $99 with a 2-year mobile broadband contract.

Verizon Wireless has now announced that it will be offering its own subsidized price netbook to customers willing to sign away two years worth of mobile broadband freedom to save some upfront cost on acquiring the netbook.

The machine Verizon will offer is the HP Mini 1151NR. The little computer runs Windows XP and offers an Intel Atom N270 CPU and a built-in cellular modem. The screen of the machine is 10-inches wide and the entire machine complete with a paltry 3-cell battery weighs 2.45 pounds. The big catch is that the machine has a puny hard drive with only 80GB of storage; the vast majority of netbooks available today offer 160GB HDDs.

AllThingsD reports that an optional 6-cell battery is available for the netbook from Verizon, but it retails for an additional $130. That is most of the $199 price that Verizon demands for the netbook. Data plans for the deal will start at $39.99.

The subsidized netbook will be available starting May 17.