MiFi is a must have…

David Pogue of the New York Times just wrote about something I’ll be adding to my “must have” list:  It’s the Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon starting in mid-May ($100 with two-year contract, after rebate).  It lets you get online anywhere you like – in a taxi, on the beach, in a hotel with disgustingly overpriced Wi-Fi – without messing around with cellular modems.

What it does is converts the cellular Internet signal into an umbrella of Wi-Fi coverage that up to five people can share. The MiFi gets its Internet signal the same way those cellular modems do – in this case, from Verizon’s excellent 3G (high-speed) cellular data network.

So what’s the usage charge?

If you just want to do e-mail and the Web, you pay $40 a month for the service (250 megabytes of data transfer, 10 cents a megabyte above that). If you watch videos and shuttle a lot of big files, opt for the $60 plan (5 gigabytes). And if you don’t travel incessantly, the best deal may be the one-day pass: $15 for 24 hours, only when you need it. In that case, the MiFi itself costs $270.

Read Pogue’s excellent article to learn more.  It sounds really cool.

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