I had the opportunity to use the Verizon MiFi for a few days and it was great. I expected it to work but it goes beyond just working.

Where? It was tested out in the middle of nowhere - well, at a location in South Carolina about two hours from Charlotte. At this spot I had a no AT&T bars, but did just barely have service. I could send a text message but not confident that I would have had much success with a non-dropping call. My iPhone reported the big "E" - that painfully slow Edge network connection. Between the Edge and almost no service signal, even opening an email via AT&T was horribly slow to the point of "why bother". I don't have a Verizon phone (the service that the MiFi uses) so can't comment on coverage bars, but it must have been decent coverage and 3G service (see below).

Usability - setup. When I showed up someone had already configured the MiFi. The configuration involves a one-time process of connecting the device to a computer via USB and going through an easy setup wizard. The person who set it up is a non-techie and had no problems with it.

Usability -  get online. I got situated and powered up my tablet. The network was detected right away and, after entering the security password, I was online. It was no different from using a standard wireless router to connect to the Internet. If I didn't already know the connection was via MiFi, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. Later in the day we had three different laptops connected to the single MiFi and none had problems.

Performance. Once online I did a little bit of web surfing and the experience was fine. Honestly, even though the connection was slower that what I'm used to on a daily basis, the experience of web browsing was totally fine. There was no point I had to sit and wait for a page to load. I ran a speed test to see what actual throughput we were getting and it tested at 1.3 Mbps download and 500 Kbps upload. No too shabby. Especially for a location that doesn't have cable or DSL as an option - and one where AT&T service barely registers.

Physical. The device is small and light - surprisingly so. It also has a rechargeable battery so after charged, you can pick it up and move around while online. I could easily stick it in my shirt pocket and walk around with my tablet while surfing the web if I wanted to.

Battery performance. I'm not sure exactly how long the battery lasts but we did use it for a few hours with no problems. The performance was identical whether plugged in to power or not. I did notice at one point that the connection started getting spotty. This was after hours of use unplugged and shortly later it started flashing red (battery dying) so I believe that performance degradation was just related to us running on battery too long.

All in all, it is a great little device and I highly recommend it for people who are mobile a lot and need decent-speed Internet - especially if you need an Internet connection for more than one device.

I really like my Dell XT Tablet PC running Windows 7. If I could magically make some changes to further improve it, I would...

...have built-in mobile Internet access. This was an option when I bought it, and is still an option on the newer Dell XT2 now (I have the original XT). It's too bad that all the mobile carriers are charging such high rates for tethered and mobile pc Internet now. I wouldn't want just this though; I'd also want some additional features combined with it as noted below.

...make it a little lighter. Don't get me wrong, it's fairly light at around 3 or so lbs - much better than some other beastly notebooks coming in over 5 lbs. In an ideal world it would be even lighter. The more I use it, the heavier it starts to feel. Getting it down to perhaps 1.5 pounds or lighter would be great!

...have an e-ink display mode. I love the idea of e-readers like the Kindle, but I don't want yet another device to deal with. I want my tablet device to satisfy that need. It's about the right size, and it has both the "brains" and the power - it should be able to do this for me. Of course I understand that the display options are a challenge and it's not as easy as "just do it", but since I'm using magic in this post, I'm going to add that feature.

...make it thinner. But don't sacrifice the current sturdy feeling of the device.

..."fix" the touch screen. I don't know if it's a hardware or a software issue, but sometimes my XT decides it isn't going to recognize the touch screen anymore. I then need to flip the screen and use the keyboard to complete whatever task I'm in the middle of. It also has some occasional recognition issues around the edges of the screen. I almost never have problems away from the edge (when the touch mode is working) but when touch doesn't work at the edges and you can't access the taskbar, the window minimize and close buttons, and other things - it's time for a reboot.

All the recent news and chatter about a potential Apple tablet reminds me of Microsoft's Origami. Remember that? The UMPC push that got so much press a couple of years ago?

I love the idea. I was one of the first to jump on that bandwagon. I bought a Samsung Q1 when they first came out and used it as much as possible. I was using Verizon's mobile services at the time and tethered my phone to the Q1 so that I could use it just about anywhere. Such great potential.

My Q1 started getting used less and less frequently though, and is now collecting dust. Why? What happened?

The screen resolution was too low. Some would argue that 800 x 480 is a really nice screen for such a small device, but hey, in today's word even 1280 x 800 feels cramped. Try using something like Outlook at 800x480 for a period of time and you'll likely start to agree that it's just a bit too small to be ideally useful.

The screen size was too small. Directly related to the resolution issue was the physical size. My Q1 has a 7" screen which feels just slightly too small. My Dell XT Tablet PC has a 12" screen, which is great. I'm not sure if there is a smaller (than 12") ideal size or not since I haven't had experience working with anything between 7-12". Perhaps 10" would be good. I'd need some serious work time on it to be sure.

The battery life on the Q1 was horrible. A mobile device of any kind with battery power limited to only about two hours is totally unacceptable in today's world. Even three years ago it was barely acceptable.

The Q1 was painfully slow. I think that anyone who attempted to do serious daily computing on the Q1 likely realized fairly soon that it was quite under-powered. Even fairly basic operations felt painfully slow to someone used to fairly zippy desktop performance.

I don't think XP was the ideal OS. My Q1 was running XP Tablet Edition, which wasn't great - largely because of the physical challenges of the Q1. I'm not sure if a better OS like Windows 7 would have made a large difference or not. (Hmm... I wonder if Windows 7 would run on the Q1. That might be an interesting experiment some day.)

Microsoft was ahead of the curve with the UMPC movement. It obviously didn't flesh-out the way they had hoped though. The hardware technology wasn't quite ready for the movement. The software was close but also still needed some improvements to be ideal.

It will be interesting to see if 1) Apple really does release a tablet device this year (the rumor mills have been wrong before) and 2) if they are able to address the concerns that prevented the UMPC push from a few years ago from really taking off.

BTW - I run Windows 7 on my Dell XT tablet and I love it - both the Dell XT hardware and also Windows 7. It's a great combination. There are some things I'd change if I had my ideal setup, but I'll leave those comments for a different day's post.