You can get smartphones from Net10 and Straight Talk at $45 to $50 per month for unlimited talk, text and data. If you don't like their selection of phones, you can simply buy a SIM from them ($14.95) and put it in your own AT&T, T-Mobile or unlocked GSM phone. No contracts.

I agree. I have a load balanced connection using two 3m / 384k AT&T DSL lines at work, and a 12m / 1m Charter cable connection at home. The Charter stuff works pretty good for streaming Netflix or Hulu depending on the time of day, but for general purpose web browsing, pages load several times faster on the "slower" DSL. I usually have 100% uptime in 30 days on the DSL. I can't get through a full day without some kind of issue on the cable. I'd have the DSL at home but the Charter cable is the only thing available to me other than 3G, ISDN or satellite. And yes I know the load balance has the advantage of being threaded, but if I unplug one circuit it is still faster.

Yeah, I use a Symbian-powered Nokia E71 and laugh at them all

Linksys, Netgear and D-Link are generally consumer grade equipment (crap)

Try a higher end product like an Engenius ECB-3500 if you desire omnidirectional coverage, or the EOC-2611P for coverage from the sidelines or in a particular direction.

Both models have excellent receivers, and they have up to 600mW of output power. That will punch through a noisy environment. 600mW is 10 times the power that most "consumer" stuff offers, and their receivers are far better.

The ECB-3500 is an indoor model which has two 5dBi antennas with diversity, and the EOC-2611P is an indoor/outdoor model and has a 10dBi panel antenna that is configurable for horizontal or vertical polarization, or diversity between the two.

Either one can be had for under $100.00. I've been using Engenius/Senao gear for a long time and I will say that it is worth three times the money.

Other than biting the bullet and pulling some Cat5, you might consider some different wireless hardware. I've used the WRT54G and found the performance to be dismal compared to high power Engenius stuff that costs about the same. I manage a real 20-24 Mb in A or G mode / WPA2 around the office with ours. Pair that with some sort of traffic shaping to prioritize what's going on (higher priority to media and lowest priority to backups, etc) IPCop maybe?

Pirates will pirate your warez no matter what you do to try to stop them. All these battles do is hurt the consumer by increasing the cost of media and hardware, and piss them off by making them jump through hoops just to watch some shitty movie. Only the lawyers win in the end.

I'll keep watching my old laserdisc collection until these clowns figure it all out.

It is nice to have ownership of my media and have full control over it for about $2.00 per title from Ebay.

haha!

At intersections that are not brightly lit by street lighting, the LED traffic signals are completely blinding to drivers at night. I actually find myself closing my eyes because of the glare so that my eyes won't have to readjust for the pitch black road on the other side of the light.

I guess it won't be a problem if the sucker is covered by snow and ice.

Just another stupid greenie wacko thing to piss us off and get us killed.

Highs in the 20's F in Nashville, Tennessee in a few days (home of Al Gore). Average high temp: 46F

Eat me, you Global Warming morons.

It goes exactly half as far before "refueling" as my 1995 GMC half ton with 6.5L turbo diesel can go on a single tank of fuel. The GMC has 250K miles on the ODO and I paid $2900.00 for it last year.

I can buy enough diesel fuel to drive another half million miles for the price of the Tesla even before figuring in the cost of its electricity. LOL

That's with a 14-year old pickup truck. Don't even get me started on the total cost of Volkswagen TDI versus these things. You can't beat dead dinosaurs.

I'm sorry, but is no one ready to call "bullshit" on the claims of going 40 miles on 8 kilowatt hours of electricity from the utility?

8 kilowatts is about 27300 btu, or the same energy contained in a LITER of gasoline.

Also, every time there is a peak demand for heating or cooling, the electric utilities are crying to us to conserve so that things don't start blowing up.

Many utilities are banning tankless electric water heaters simply because the infrastructure cannot handle the load. A tankless water heater is a load similar to what an electric car would place on a circuit (realistically). If these got popular (and they will because there is a sucker born every minute), we'll have a power generation crisis on our hands real quick.

Spare us the bullshit. Make my high mileage car a TDI, please. And keep your hippie electric car out of the left lane and out of its way!

Oh, and one more freakin thing... When will Apple bestow the luxury of being able to cut, copy and paste on the iPhone?

Pretty please, with sugar on top.

Try logging an iPhone or Touch on to a WPA-PSK network with a 63-character random ASCII key without a QWERTY or the ability to copy and paste. It is impossible!

If we could copy and paste, it could be put on a MicroSD card and inserted in the the side of it and voila... Oh, wait a minute... no freakin card reader either. Thanks, guys!

I guess we'll all get that those features when Apple starts putting a second mouse button on its computers, huh?

These are all more reasons why I chose a Blackberry Bold.

Tethering and MMS cost extra on every other device that AT&T provides service for. What makes this one any different?

Like some other posters on this thread, I find it sad that the iPhone is just now getting around to supporting these features.

I recently purchased a Blackberry 9000 (Bold) through AT&T and it does both. I can share my phone's data plan with other devices via USB or Bluetooth. Piece of cake. It does, however, cost an extra $30/mo for the ability to tether it. Sucks, but that is half the cost of a standalone data card.

Also, the author of the story missed the reason that Verizon and the iPhone didn't happen. Verizon is a CDMA carrier, whereas AT&T is GSM. There is no such thing as a CDMA iPhone. Everyone may bitch about AT&T, but they are the only carrier other than T-Mobile in the United States that CAN support the iPhone. AT&T's 3G coverage leaves much to be desired, but it is a hell of a lot better than T-Mobile's. To make things worse, T-Mobile also has no plan that allows tethering of its devices. It is prohibited in the TOS.

Don't get your hopes up for a CDMA version any time soon. The problem with CDMA and the iPhone is that CDMA radios are larger and consume far more power than GSM radios. Think of the battery life that you have with your current iPhone, and cut it in half.

The Motorola RAZR is a prime example of a device that was nice on GSM, but the CDMA versions should have never made it out the door. Once I asked a friend how long the battery lasted in her Verizon RAZR v3. She said "Oh, usually till lunch time". haha!

I did this for a while using a Verizon USB720 (USB dongle, Evdo Rev A). I live in the suburbs of Nashville, TN so service is a little spotty around my home. It takes a little effort to find just the right "sweet spot" to get a good signal to it. I ended up purchasing a Kyocera wireless router that was designed just for the purpose of sharing a mobile broadband card. The Kyocera (made by D-link, so there are D-link variants out there too) has slots to plug in your Express Card or USB modems. Once you set it up, you simply plug in your modem and power it up. A minute later, you have access to multiple computers. It is kind of buggy, but it's nice to have. It even came with a cigarette lighter plug so that it can be used in your vehicle. Plug it all in, toss it on the dash, and you've got internet access just about anywhere.

The service was expensive ($59.99 per month), and wasn't the fastest thing around, but it was the best offering that I could get in the sticks (until the local cable company get their act together). If I put the WAP in just the right place, I could get 900Kbits down / 256 Kbits up, and the latency is slow if you're a gamer, but totally reasonable if you're a more basic user (~80 ms).

When my cable company had an offer for both 5Mbit / 512Kbit cable AND basic TV for $19.99 per month for a year, needless to say I signed up for that.

Still got the mobile stuff though. Comes in handy! The mobile WAP was great when a storm knocked out power at work in the city. I even plugged our four Vonage lines in to it. Conversations were a little laggy, but we still were able to make and receive calls. It sure beat the hell out of having nothing and being dead in the water! :)

If you're a casual user that needs mobile access more than anything it's great. If you are heavy in to gaming or downloading music or videos, leave that to dsl or cable.