This is a very slick little device — think of a portable wireless WiFI router but instead of plugging into your cable or DSL it uses a 3G cell phone connection to provide wireless connectivity to up to five devices.
I am sitting at Logan Airport using the sucker — but can’t tunnel into the corporate VPN with it. Once I solve that snag I am flying and won’t need to commit every new thinkpad to a Verizon or AT&T WWAN/EVDO wireless WAN account.
So, now to cancel my X200’s AT&T account and live in the cloud while sticking it to the airport paid WiFi gods. Whoops, airport wifi is free right now thanks to Google.
You could buy one of these and equip a stack of Wifi enabled netbooks with one paid account …. the economics are very interesting and very disruptive provided I don’t bump over the 5 gigabytes of monthly bandwidth.
In this day and age of bloated Flash video websites, 5GB/month really isn’t that much. These carriers aren’t stupid. They don’t want to become dumb pipes, but that is precisely what I want them to be.
In a cinch you can set up your Windows 7 laptop that has WWAN into a WiFi hotspot by using Connectify which uses the virtual WiFi driver of windows. This works with the latest (Intel) drivers using Intel 5100 or 5300 WiFi chip.