Hello MiFi

I spend a lot of time on the road. While bandwidth is almost pervasive these days it is not always free and yes there are even times you can't find it. I have had various WWAN cards since they where first offered by Sprint many years ago. My most recent incarnation was a PCI Express card. This has worked great with my MacBook Pro.

There have been some downsides to the card. Sometimes I wish I could use it with other devices. Not all notebooks have PCI Express slots. And yes there are other devices that can use WiFI that don't have a slot at all. Apple also recently released their new line of notebooks and the PCI Express slot is gone. Writing on the wall?

My connection at Sprint (yes I have one, no I won't share the deets) asked if I wanted to trade in my WWAN card for a new MiFi. Umm let me think about that for about 1 second.

My MiFi arrived about a week ago. I waited to post this so I could kick the tires a bit. Everything that I had hoped the device to be it is! The first wonderful surprise I got with the MiFi was the activation. The box came with one of those stop read me first pages. It said don't call but go to an activation URL. Very skeptically I went to the URL. I was surprised (shocked) at how easily the website worked. Simply provided my login, picked the device I wanted to upgrade from and bam it told me it was activated. The whole process took less than 5 minutes.

The MiFi acts like any another broadband router. Connects to the Sprint network on side and broadcasts WiFi on the other. The MiFi is configured through a simple web interface very similar to any other home router. You can choose your security connection, mine went to WPA2, and you can chose how many people can connect. I sent mine to the max which is 5.

My first tests with the MiFi have been wonderful. I have connected several notebooks and yes even my iPhone to the MiFi. This makes for a very interesting use case. My old 2.5 iPhone can now have faster bandwidth than the new 3GS!

I was also a bit surprised as to how small the MiFi was. Below is a pic next to my iPhone for a size comparison.

And yes this was posted from my Mifi!