It may well, argued Daniel R. Hesse, the chief executive of Sprint Nextel, when I spoke to him after the embattled wireless carrier announced its second-quarter earnings last week. He said that an increasing number of customers were going to use mobile hot spots — tiny devices that connect any nearby gadget equipped with Wi-Fi to the Internet using a cellular data network. (In May, David Pogue reviewed one of the first of these hot spots, Novatel’s MiFi 2200, calling the concept a “jaw-dropper.”)

As devices like digital cameras and portable game machines seek to communicate with the world over the Internet, Mr. Hesse argues, this sort of hot spot is better than trying to put a cellphone connection on each gadget or accepting the one-device limit of a wireless data card for a laptop.

“If it’s your iTouch or MP3 player or your netbook or your PC or whatever it might be, even your BlackBerry phone, it can use Wi-Fi to connect to the mobile hot spot to connect to our 3G network,” Mr. Hesse said. “You won’t need a separate bill for each and every device.”

Mr. Hesse said that there were already 425 million computers and other gadgets with Wi-Fi connections.

The one bill you do have won’t be small, however. Sprint charges $99, after rebate, for the Novatel device and $59.99 a month for up to 5 gigabytes of usage. Verizon Wireless offers the same device with a range of price plans.

Mr. Hesse said the hot spot, MiFi, is selling well, but he expected the concept to take off as Sprint introduces its faster 4G network in conjunction with its Clearwire affiliate.

He imagines that people will put the hot spots “in the coffee-cup holder of the car.” He added, “As you go down the road, everybody is connected.”

This isn’t entirely fanciful. J. Wilson, who reviewed the Verizon version of the device on Amazon.com, is already taking it on the road:

It’s surprising how easy it is to connect when traveling in an RV (I’m retired, so I find myself in many geographical locations, when connecting …) and this gadget has provided me with Wi-Fi connection in the Grand Canyon’s RV Trailer Village, in the mountains above Boulder, Co, and at the border of Glacier Nat’l Park (at the portal of West Glacier, East of Whitefish).

And on my commuter bus ride to New Jersey, my laptop is picking up hot spots called MiFi, implying that people are already throwing these gadgets in their purses or briefcases so they can surf on the road.

This sort of mobile hot spot clearly has some uses. It’s great for groups of business travelers. And even some families that travel with more than one laptop might well lust after one. I’m not convinced this is a mainstream product, though. It’s expensive and adds yet another gadget in your life to recharge. I wonder whether you would rather simply carry a cellphone that can connect — by way of Wi-Fi or Bluetooth — to your camera, game machine and so on. But I do think more and more people will want some version of what David Pogue called the “personal Wi-Fi bubble.”

Still, Sprint, which is still losing customers rapidly, needs every weapon it can muster to generate excitement.

What do you think? Would you pay for a portable Internet hot spot so that any gadget you own can go online? By Saul Hansell

Mobile Internet Hot Spots: Hot or Not? is a post from: CELL PHONE

Chapter 1: Apple creates the iPhone.

Chapter 2: Apple opens the App Store, an online catalog of cheap or free programs that you can download straight to the phone. Programmers all over the world write 70,000 apps for it that perform every amazing feat you can name.

Chapter 3: One of them is Google Voice, a front end for Google’s amazing free phone-management system. Among its many features: it lets you send free text messages and make 2-cent international calls, right from the iPhone.

Chapter 4: Apple mysteriously rejects this eminently useful app, refusing to list it in the App Store.

Then it goes even farther: it actually deletes from the App Store two similar programs called GV Mobile and Voice Central, which have been there for months. That is, Apple changes its mind retroactively — and won’t give the developers any logical explanation.

Chapter 5: The blogosphere goes nuts. There’s only one possible reason that Apple might delete these apps: because AT&T demanded it.

Why would AT&T care? Because of those free text messages and cheap international calls, of course. If these apps became popular, AT&T’s revenue could take a serious hit.

This business has blown up in Apple/AT&T’s face. The Federal Communications Commission, in fact, is now sniffing around, sending letters to Apple, AT&T and Google, clearly wondering if there’s some illegal collusion going on. A few days later, Google’s chief executive stepped down from Apple’s board; tension is rising.

AT&T/Apple’s logic doesn’t even make sense. If the object is to prevent you from making cheap international calls, then they would also have to block Skype and all the other apps (already available) that let you do so. If it’s to prevent you from sending free text messages, then they should also block FreeMMS and other apps that already do that.

It’s almost as though AT&T/Apple never really cared while the apps in question stayed where they belonged—under the radar. But once big-shot Google got involved… well, we can’t have that, can we?

(The whole thing is especially galling since text messages are pure profit for the cell carriers. Text messaging itself was invented when a researcher found “free capacity on the system” in an underused secondary cellphone channel. They may cost you and the recipient 20 cents each, but they cost the carriers pretty much zip.)

In short, what Apple and AT&T have accomplished with their heavy-handed, Soviet information-control style is not to bury these useful apps. Instead, Apple/AT&T have elevated them to martyr status—and, in effect, thrown down a worldwide challenge to programmers everywhere.

“Get around THIS,” they’re saying.

But guess what? It won’t take long. They’ve put a rock in the river, but the water will just find a way around it.

Already, Google says it is readying a replacement for the Google Voice app that will offer exactly the same features as the rejected app—except that it will take the form of a specialized, iPhone-shaped Web page. For all intents and purposes, it will behave exactly the same as the app would have; you can even install it as an icon on your Home screen.

What’s Apple going to do now? Start blocking access to individual Web sites?

No question about it: the next chapter has yet to be written. But I think you’re going to like it. this information from here

Is Google Voice a Threat to AT&T? is a post from: CELL PHONE