Thanks for the well thought out response Don Landis. some thoughts.....
1. If your needs combine a cell phone with the internet then you need to be concerned about cell phone reliability as well as the internet.
My old PDA, the Cingular 8125 was not great for phone calls, but worked good with Internet. I mean, it was only Edge and 2.5G, but at the time it was as good as good could get for Internet. My current phone is the ATT Tilt (which is the 8925, newer model of the same phone) and it has excellent voice call quality, Internet quality on 3G, and the tethering works good as I already pointed out with that third party software.
Best bang for the buck?
3. Will you be using the mobile internet service in areas of high population density increase like at trade show locations or just average? Know that the CDMA technology works better in high population density increases but GSM (3G) services will be lower cost.
Great point and something I had not thought of really. 3G works great, as there is great coverage in my city, but I have not had the need to use it in a dense setting, such as a trade show. I can see where that would certainly be a problem. My ATT Tilt, everywhere I have tried it, has given me great speeds in an average, around town scenerio.
I tried to use the tethered connection with third party software but the speeds I got were less than half using tethered so I stick with my EVDO built in card in the laptop. It is reliable, easy to connect, and it just works.
You seem to really know what you are talking about, but let me still point out that you have to make sure you are using the proper settings. Often times, providers will have a proxy server and different gateway that the media enabled phones go through (at a lower price of around $15 vs $40 for PDA Internet) and the idiots at tech support will often try to route you through the media enabled cell phone gateway as opposed to the Internet gateway used by PDAs or laptops. Cingular/ATT is known for doing this out of ignorance on the tech support's behalf. Back when I had the 8125 I researched this on the net and found it was night and day when I changed to the proper settings on my PDA. They walked me through putting in settings that they would give a phone media user, which was their slower connection (at the PDA price, I don't think so!). The PDA should be using the same gateway as the laptop, and will get the faster speeds. They can tell if you are tethering or not, and they will bill you the laptop rate if they think you are tethering. But the way the third party software works, it tricks the network into thinking you are doing all that transfer on the PDA. So you pay the price you would pay for PDA Internet ($40 unlimited in my case) and have the benefits of using the laptop. I am sure if you abused this with heavy file sharing, they would catch on that you are not using your PDA for all that traffic, but if you are just doing email, surfing, trade show credit card screen transactions, etc, you are fine with a third party software and pay far less.
As a computer tech dealing with the general public, I know realtors and other folks with the dedicated laptop cards and I'll tell you, from what I have seen recently, these cards from Verizon, Sprint, or ATT are really no faster than tethering to a PDA. The only difference is they are paying more in price each month. Often double or more. I really think your slower speeds when tethering were more a problem of an older network or going through the wrong gateway. But in your case it sounds like you don't have the time to monkey around with tethering and cost isn't as much of an issue. So hey, whatever works, works. I mean, it is certainly easier to not have to connect a PDA to a laptop and have all that clutter, it just costs $40 or more a month for that luxury.
