evdo

Not even a year after Virgin Mobile introduced Broadband2Go, its pay-as-you-go broadband service, it is now expanding it with even more data while still keeping costs low.

The $60 plan, for example, now offers 5GB, when it was 1GB previously. You now get 1GB for $40, and the 300MB for $20, though you do need to use the data within 30 days. As before, there's a $10 plan that only gives you 100MB that you need to use in 10 days instead.

There are no activation fees, and megabytes can be added as needed. To use it, you can … Read more

A MiFi is a nifty little device you can get from Sprint or Verizon here in the States. It receives a cellular data signal and then rebroadcasts it as a Wi-Fi connection.

However, one annoying thing is that when you plug it into a USB port, it insists on acting as a modem instead of a Wi-Fi access point. This means that you can't charge it from your laptop and share it the data connection. I ran into this issue at an airport when I wanted to charge the MiFi and share with my colleague, but I couldn't … Read more

ASPEN, Colo.--One thing I love is finding uses for things that perhaps no one has thought of before.

I'd already been on Road Trip 2009 for several days when I arrived in this tony Colorado mountain town known best as a playground for the rich and famous. I was hoping to go for a walk and find something good to eat.

It had been a long day of driving, starting in Colorado Springs, and traveling over Independence Pass, a 12,095 "Top of the Rockies" spot just on the Continental Divide. I had planned to stroll … Read more

This is not what you want to hear when you call tech support and tell them your operating system is OS X.

"What's that?" or "OSN?"

But that's what happened when I called Verizon to troubleshoot connection trouble on my EVDO card. I had to say it was a Mac before they understood. Well, sort of understood.

I was having difficulty where I would make a connection and within 30 seconds the connection would be terminated.

The first person I talked to asked me to launch Verizon's VZ Access Manager software. I explained … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Over the 8,260 miles I've driven on Road Trip 2006 and Road Trip 2007, I've visited, written about, and photographed some of the most interesting destinations in California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.

I've also gotten to road-test some really cool gadgets and drive the spiffy and comfortable Infiniti QX56 over some long and very hot distances.

Now I'm getting ready to depart on Road Trip 2008. This year, rather than leaving from my home base in San Francisco, I'll be flying east and starting a grand tour of the … Read more

MARIN HEADLANDS, Calif.--This is very surreal.

I'm sitting on a bench on top of a cliff here, overlooking the Pacific Ocean and looking straight at the Golden Gate Bridge.

For the last 15 minutes, there has been a steady stream of sirens from emergency vehicles, and I can see that all traffic on the bridge is completely stopped. I Twittered what I was seeing, and almost immediately, one of my followers replied with details of what seems to be a multiple-vehicle accident blocking most of the lanes on the bridge.

Before this happened, I was planning on starting … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--One of the cool things about going on road trips for CNET News.com, as I've done in both 2006 and 2007, is that I get to test out a bunch of cool tech.

For the trip I'll be embarking on next month, that is very much the case, and one of the gadgets I've been looking to get going is the USB727 EVDO modem Verizon lent me for the trip.

The only problem has been that until today, I had been unable to get the modem to work properly. I had been told it was … Read more

It's Official: Hulu Opens Up on Wednesday http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/10/ its-official-hulu-opens-up-on-wednesday/

Ars: Buzzkill http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ 20080311-restrictions-distribution-rifts-may-hamstring-hulus-launch.html

Kentucky lawmaker wants to make anonymous Internet posting illegal (thanks, Jim!) http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ 20080310-lawmakers-attempt-to-criminalize-anonymous-posting-doomed.html http://www.wtvq.com/content/midatlantic/tvq/ video.apx.-content-articles-TVQ-2008-03-05-0011.html

Michael Jackson’s company denies Beatles coming to iTunes http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9890124-7.html

Lionsgate adding iTunes digital copy to some DVDs http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/03/11/ lionsgate-adding-itunes-digital-copy-to-some-dvds

EU clears Google-DoubleClick’s $3.1 billion merger http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/ 20080311-eu-clears-googledoubleclicks-3-1-merger.html… Read more

The HTC Mogul is about to get fast...real fast. Today, Sprint released a software upgrade that brings an EV-DO Rev. A upgrade to the Windows Mobile smartphone, making it the first such handset in the United States. EV-DO Rev. A is an evolution of EV-DO which boosts download speeds from the 400Kbps-to-700Kbps range to 600Kbps-to-1.4Mbps range, while upload speeds will average about 350Kpbs to 500Kpbs (compared with EV-DO's 50Kpbs to 70Kbps). In short, you're going to get faster Web browsing, e-mail, and downloads--that is, if you're lucky enough to live in a coverage area.

According … Read more