Over the past few weeks, I have been considering a mobile broadband solution. My reasoning is two-fold: I’d like a backup in case my regular connection fails–Comcast here has become somewhat spotty as of late–and something for when I’m on the road at a conference and don’t want to depend on the available Wi-Fi, which is sometimes unreliable.
For the time being, I have settled on Virgin Mobile’s Broadband2Go offering (I’ll have a review of it coming in a week or two after I’ve put it through its paces). It’s cheap, the initial cost of startup is not high, and it’s now Mac compatible. But while at Wal-Mart, I was shocked to see Verizon and AT&T are now offering their own prepaid plans. I must have missed their announcements–and it’s kind of surprising to me that those companies be interested in getting into the game.
If you live in the UK and are willing to sign a two-year contract for a data plan that costs 35 pounds a month–that’s about $55 to us yanks–you can get 
It’s tempting to interpret every move AT&T makes in terms of its relationship with Apple, its status as the exclusive iPhone carrier in the US, and the implications of that exclusivity ending, as it will someday. It’s also dangerous to think that way, because the tea leaves are all too hard to read. Still, one fascinating sidelight of this morning’s 
“The toughest thing about success is that you’ve got to keep on being a success.” Irving Berlin supposedly said that, and the quote was on my mind this morning as I attended 
I’ve had an iPhone 4 for around eight hours now, and have come to the conclusion that writing anything that reads like a review would be premature at this point. Too much of what’s important–video and photo quality, performance, battery life, and more–is dangeous to judge based on first impressions. (And multitasking, one of the key new features, might take weeks to get a grip on–I want to try multitasking-enabled versions of all my favorite apps.)