

I got the MiFi, the personal, battery powered Wi-Fi router, in for testing a while ago. Today, the SIM card turned up, and after a little jiggery-pokery, it’s up and running. And you know what? The combo of iPod Touch and MiFi might just be better than the iPhone.

The MiFi was recently announced for the Spanish market, and is carried on the same terrible network as the iPhone: Movistar, the mobile wing of Telefónica. In fact, as Movistar is also getting the Palm Pre, you could argue that it has all the worthwhile gadgets to itself.

The iPhone price situation has improved here since the 3GS showed up, and you can now combine any data plan with any voice plan. The variable is the price you pay for the handset. But even the new “tarifa plana iphone premium” offers just 3GB per month of data before the speed drops, and still costs €40 ($57) per month, plus voice.

The same company’s best internet plan for computers, though, is the same price for 10GB, after which you can still get service at a lower speed. This is actually a better deal than in the US.

Still, this part is Spain-centric. The real point is that if you have a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot in your pocket, it is going to be cheaper than an iPhone contract pretty much anywhere, and can not only enable your iPod Touch to have an always on connection, but let you make Skype calls and stream music without having to worry about the usual iPhone size limits, as you’re on Wi-Fi. You can also share the connection with five machines in total, including a netbook for true on the go video calls and (gasp) Spotify.

Setup

Setting up was a little tricky. The included software (actually on the 2GB microSD card inside the MiFi) let me use the unit as a USB modem, but it wouldn’t connect via HSPA (this is the GSM version of the box). I jiggered around in my Mac’s network settings and found that I needed to add a nonce password to the MiFi to get things moving. After that all is sweet. Switch on and lights start to flash. You connect via Wi-Fi like you would anywhere, and the machine automatically connects to the internet, A glowing purple light tells you you have a 3G connection. It will also fall back on EDGE or even GPRS, for which there are different colored lights.

You’ll also want to change the security settings. This MiFi shipped with no protection on the wireless connection, and one of my many neighbors had actually hopped on before I could even type 192.168.1.1 into my browser to configure things.

In Use

It’s only been a half a day, but I have given most things a quick stress test. It’s fast. The connection, using Speedtest.net, is 1.77 Mbps down, and a surprising 1.11 Mbps up. Compared to my home connection - 2.55 Mbps down and a pathetic 0.26 Mbps up, and it looks pretty fast.

I tested the MiFi with Skype (works fine), Spotify (blisteringly fast, instant playing for tracks, although the local cacheing helps) on a netbook running OS X, and with Google Maps on an iPod Touch (Street View and core location both work great). Skype also works well, but as yet another pair of Apple headphones (with mic) have died on me I couldn’t test call quality.

This quick test is, as I said, the result of a few hours use, but it already looks like the combo of MiFi and iPod in a pocket could be all the mobile power I need. I’ll be stress testing this over the coming weeks (beach, moving vehicles, out-of-city trips) to see if it holds up, but as it looks now, I might actually consider buying one when this one goes back. Stay tuned.

Product page [Movistar]

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