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I run Joikuspot on my phone for my personal WIFI bubble. It works really well, and I just pay a little more to my 3G mobile phone provider for the extra data. http://www.joikuspot.com/aboutJoikuSpot.php

"What if you had a personal Wi-Fi bubble, a private hot spot, that followed you everywhere you go? Incredibly, there is such a thing."

Yeah, it's called a phone!

If you have a Windows Mobile phone with an internet plan, you could use WMWifiRouter(the most advanced of the pack), which has been available since 2007, and was the very first app to do this.

If you have a Symbian phone, you could use JoikuSpot, which has been available since 2008.

To continue, for iPhone you could use PDANet. For Android there are also several programs available as well!

Why would you use something like this and get another data subscription when all you need is already in your pocket? Aside from the internet plan which you are likely to have already, all of these software are available for a small one-time fee - likely lower than one month of the data package itself.

Funny thing, none of those apps ever made it out of the firehose when I posted them. What makes this (very expensive and limited) product so special?

You can buy unlocked phones in the U.S., too. On AT&T's and T-Mobile's networks, there's nothing preventing you from doing it. Verizon and the other CDMA carriers are a bit tougher, and you do admittedly get mostly older phones on the secondary market there, but that's what you get for going with a proprietary, non-standard technology.

I use T-Mobile and have bought my own GSM phones for years; sometimes I've chosen to buy phones that are a few years behind the bleeding edge because I'm a cheap bastard, but I certainly haven't been forced to. I think most Americans don't do this because they're addicted to the subsidy business model that the carriers promote in order to lock customers in. The subsidies have deflated their idea of what a phone ought to cost, down to a level that's far less than fair market value. Phones that are at least $100 are "free," and something like the iPhone 3G which is probably at least a $500 product (I think it goes for even more than that, sold legitimately unlocked in jurisdictions where the law requires that option), is "$200".

But if you want to buy an unlocked phone you can do that, and you can run whatever software you want to on it. On my Nokia E61, for instance, I have a WiFi tethering program (JoikuSpot -- it's awesome) and the phone has a SIP VOIP client and a VPN client built right into the operating system. And it has none of the remote-update or kill-switch "features" that seem to be de rigueur on branded smartphones. No bullshit tie-in to a proprietary application store or code-signing requirements, either -- you can download and run all the crap from the Internet you want. You can buy one right now, drop your SIM card in, and away you go.

If people buy subsidized and/or crippled phones through their cell carriers than they pretty much deserve the crippled pieces of shit that they get. Good phones without restrictions are there for the buying if you're willing to pay what they actually cost, and what people in other countries routinely pay.

I have a mobile broadband option for my Macbook:

JoikuSpot on my Nokia E71.

Persistent internet connectivity is definitely one of those things I never thought I'd find useful, but now that I have it in the form of a smartphone, I'm never going back. Like from-my-cold-dead-hands never.

First, being able to send and receive email anywhere is neat. This may not be quite as impressive to people who've been on unlimited-SMS plans for a while, but I never got into text messaging. Push email on the other hand has definitely changed how I work. (And does seem like a potential source of work/life imbalance; I keep the push feature turned off after hours.)

Services like Google Maps are suddenly a lot more useful when used from a GPS-enabled smartphone than I'd ever realized they were before (and I'd been a big fan of them on my computer, too). It's done to walking around what having a navigation unit did to driving; I can basically go out and not really be terribly worried about getting somewhere, or looking up a store's hours, or finding the nearest [whatever] near [someplace]. It is worth getting a smartphone with GPS for this purpose alone, IMO.

Being able to do a quick Google search anywhere, pretty much at the drop of a hat, is also nice. I think it's one of those things that will pretty quickly become second-nature to a lot of people; even the people who don't actually have phones that can do it themselves, quickly learn that other people do and expect the ability to be there. Wikipedia is a little ugly on my phone at least, but it's handy to have access to as well.

My bank, Amtrak, and Delta Airlines all have mobile sites up and running now, and it seems to becoming more common daily. It is really nice to be able to look and see, as soon as you hit the tarmac, whether your connecting flight is still on-time or been delayed (meaning: do you need to haul ass off the plane, or can you wait and let everyone else get off first?).

There's also software that lets you use a 802.11-capable handset (at least Symbian ones) as an access point, which is great if you want an alternative to finicky Bluetooth or USB tethering, or you want to share your cell data connection with a group of people in a remote location. That's saved me a lot of headaches. (Software is JoikuSpot, I'm a big fan.)

I can see how nothing that a smartphone does is really impossible to do with a small laptop and free wireless connections -- and that was the route I took, for several years -- but there's really very little comparison. I don't carry my laptop around nearly as much since getting the smartphone, and I haven't felt like the money for the data service was anything but a great deal since getting it, either.

http://www.joikuspot.com/ - For Symbian (Nokia) phones. Allows you to use your phone as a modem and share the web using the builtin WLAN, setting it up as an accesspoint.

Now that's awesomeness :)

What, 10 euros a day?

Let's see, I pay 10 euros a month for unlimited (tethering allowed, no hidden bandwidth cap) 3G access on my phone here in Europe. Ok, it's only full UMTS, not full HSPA, but it gets the job done when I'm not on a 8-24 mbit line at home or work. That's 30 times cheaper than 10 euro's a day. What a strange 'simple' figure is that anyway, who spends 10 euros a day on mobile internet?

As for the wifi hotspots, well to be honest I havent encountered many of them and I do live in a big city, but I haven't really searched for them either. I know the university and two or three of my favourite bars have them (never see people with laptops in there, but I imagine it's nice for others who have wifi enabled phones but don't have a data plan). Unsecured access points are everywhere.

Roaming are awful though, especially here in Europe. You go somewhere near the border, you get the same provider but from a different country and suddenly you have to get a second mortgage to google. Glad the EU is looking into it.

That being said, if you are waiting around somewhere and you need internet where your data plan isn't 'valid' (or you don't have one), you can make a wifi hotspot anywhere if you can find somebody with a phone and a data plan with WMWifiRouter or JoikuSpot softwares, depending on the type of phone they have.