David Pogue of the New York Times reviews Virgin Mobile’s pay-as-you go MiFi: Once you’ve paid $150 for the MiFi itself, you get unlimited wireless broadand on the Sprint network for up to five devices at a time. For an amazingly reasonable $40 a month. If I weren’t on contract with Verizon for a MiFi for the next 18 months–at $60 a month–I’d be on this deal in a nanosecond.

And…we have a winner! Frequent Technologizer commenter MikeCerm entered our Apple Music Event Predictions Survey and won the random drawing for the $100 Apple gift card. Congrats to Mike and thanks to all who participated.

Earlier this week, I asked you to predict what Apple would announce at the music event it held yesterday. Time for a recap! (Executive summary: You got a bunch of stuff right but missed out on a few key points.)

You said: Apple will announce a new iPod Touch, a new iPod Nano, and a new Apple TV. It won’t announce any other new products.

What happened: Apple did announce a new Touch, a new Nano, and a new Apple TV. But it also unveiled a new iPod Shuffle. (It released a new version of iTunes as well, but I’ll cut you slack on that one, since I didn’t ask specifically about that app.)

You said: The iPad will get at least some of iOS 4′s new features.

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I’m in Berlin for IFA, Europe’s biggest consumer-electronics trade event. The show floor doesn’t open until tomorrow, but yesterday and today have been filled with press conferences by major tech companies–and Samsung’s conference this morning ended with the official introduction of its Galaxy Tab tablet, the biggest IFA news so far.

The Tab is certainly an iPad-like device, but there are some striking differences. Its screen is 7″, making the device a bit larger than a Kindle and substantially smaller than a 9.7″ iPad. (Samsung says it’s pocketable, and it is…if you’re wearing a jacket.) The Tab weighs 13.4 ounces–far less than the pound-and-a-half iPad. It has cameras on the front (for video chat) and back (for snapping photos and apps such as augmented reality). And like the 5″ Dell Streak, it’s not only a 3G data device but a 3G device that can make phone calls.

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Good news! Microsoft is celebrating the first anniversary of Windows 7′s release by bringing back the Windows 7 Family Pack which it briefly offered when the OS shipped. The Family Pack offers three Windows 7 Home Premium upgrades for $149.99, and is an excellent deal considering that one upgrade license sells for $119.99. It goes on sale October 3rd in the US, and as before, it’s available “while supplies last.”

I don’t mean to be churlish about an attractive offer, but I simply still don’t understand why the Family Pack is a once-in-a-while special offer rather than a basic fact of life for Windows users.

With Apple’s OS X, the Family Pack is a version, not a sale. Multiple-user pricing is quite common elsewhere, too (random example: Buying Trend Micro’s Internet Security entitles you to install it on three PCs). Offhand, I don’t know of any other software company that offers family pricing, then takes it away, then brings it back…and warns you that it’ll go away again at some unspecified point.

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I’m sorry I wasn’t at Apple’s music event today to cover it live. I had fun watching it via Apple’s live video stream from the lobby bar here at the Grand Hyatt in Berlin, though. (I give the experience a B- from a technical standpoint: Eighty percent of the time, the stream worked well, fifteen percent I got audio but the picture froze, five percent it misbehaved in other ways. Then again, I was on iffy hotel Wi-Fi, so the glitchiness might have been on my end rather than Apple’s.)

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It was all fun and games when Apple slung mud at Sony and Nintendo during last year’s iPod press event, but this year’s smear was just nasty, and not entirely accurate.

Before Steve Jobs introduced the new iPod Touch, he immediately started bragging about the device’s gaming dominance. He claimed that the iPod Touch accounts for half of the portable gaming market, with more sales than and outsells Sony and Nintendo’s handhelds combined.

A claim like that needs a bunch of asterisks. As I pointed out a year ago, fighting a console war means manipulating statistics to your favor, and Apple is guilty once again.

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Quite a few people — including myself — thought when Steve Jobs walked off the stage saying not a thing about the now aging iPod classic that it was the end of the line for that model. That is not so: Apple PR has confirmed that the classic line will live on, keeping the same price and capacity structure as it has now, but with no yearly refresh like its counterparts.

Such a move is quite unusual for a company that typically lets none of its flagship products go more than a year without some type of redesign or rework. But it’s also telling — Apple likely thinks the days of the classic are numbered.

As it stands right now, Apple is unable to offer a high-capacity flash based iPod as flash memory prices are still too high. Remember that the iPod classic has a maximum storage capacity of 160GB at $249: the highest capacity iPod touch comes in at 64GB, but has a fairly prohibitive $399 price tag along with it.

Not a good deal for those of us with insanely big digital media collections.

It is quite possible that Apple is hedging its bets that flash will continue to drop in price allowing it to offer a comparatively sized iPod touch in the near future. Also, there is not much more that the Cupertino company could do to the design other than add multi-touch — but the touch line is the future of the iPod so why bother?

I don’t fancy myself a Apple prognosticator but I would venture an educated guess that the classic has only a few more months left. It just so happened that the market didn’t cooperate with Apple’s scheduling that it could have announced a phase out at its September music event. It is coming though, and likely very soon.

Or trying to, at least, from Berlin (I’m here for the IFA consumer electronics show). Join me at twitter.com/harrymccracken.

Cnet’s Ina Fried tries, (mostly) likes Windows Phone 7.

Is Gmail an e-mail service or a comprehensive receptacle for just about every Web-based service you’ll ever need? This guest post at TechCrunch argues that it should stay focused on getting e-mail right.

Sounds like Netflix Watch Instantly may get some Amazonian competition soon.

HP is anouncing a bunch of consumer laptop news today, including models with emphasis on 3D, audio, and cool performance–plus an adapter that lets users stream high-definition movies from a computer to an HDTV. I got a preview during press briefings which the company held last week.

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Back in 2006, before the world knew what a Kindle was, Sony released the first modern e-reader with a power-efficient, glare-free E-Ink screen. It’s upgraded them and added new models ever since–and it’s announcing improved versions of all its models today, a week after Amazon started shipping its newest Kindle. The company gave me a sneak peek last week.

As before, Sony is the only major e-reader maker that offers devices in three sizes: the 7″ Daily Edition, the 6″ Touch Edition (with a screen the same size as the one on the standard Kindle and on the Nook), and the 5″ Pocket Edition. Last year’s Touch and Daily Editions had touch-screen interfaces that worked with a fingertip (for general navigation) or a stylus (for note-taking and other precision work). The big news is that the whole line now sports touch, including the Pocket Edition–and Sony has come up with a way to implement technology without adding a layer to the screen. (Last year’s touch Sonys had murkier screens than the non-touch competition.)

In my brief hands-on time with the readers, the displays looked good. (I wasn’t able to compare them side-by-side with other e-readers, but they were noticeably more legible than last year’s Sonys.) The touch input worked reasonably well, too. But flipping pages didn’t have quite the effortless feel of e-reading apps on an iPad, an iPhone, or an Android phone, and I think the Kindle’s less fancy input system–physical buttons and a keyboard–works at least as well for the basics of exploring books.

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What will Apple announce at its music event? By noon or so tomorrow, we’ll know all there is to know. Let’s wrap up the period of blissful ignorance, rampant rumors, and informed speculation with our traditional Technologizer community predictions.

As usual, I surveyed you guys and asked you to give your best guesses at what the news will involve. For questions in which you could choose only one answer, whatever answer got a plurality of responses counts as the prediction. For questions that let you choose multiple answers, any answer that more than fifty percent of you chose counts as a prediction. (I’ll note the percentage that chose each answer).

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When I liveblog Apple press events, the number one question from attendees is…well, kind of irritating, once you’ve heard it for the four hundredth time: “Is there a live stream of this event?” Usually, the answer is no, unless you count the occasional unauthorized spystream from someone in the audience using a phone app like Qik. Unlike a number of its competitors, Apple’s practice has been to post video of its events later rather than to broadcast it live.

Not tomorrow, though: The company has announced that it’ll broadcast a live stream of its traditional September music event. And there’s an interesting twist: It’s using its HTTP Streaming technology, which works on Macs, iPhones, and iPads. And that’s it. Windows users are apparently out of luck, although I imagine they’ll still be able watch a playback version later.

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