For over a year I’ve been using a 3G dongle to access the Net when on the move. My experience has been patchy, but one of the main irritations is having to hook the gizmo to a laptop using a USB cable. (Another grouse concerned the fact that the drivers for some Linux distros seemed erratic.)

So I’ve cancelled the network account for the dongle and bought this MiFi on a pay-as-you-use tariff instead. It’s a really neat gadget. It hooks up to the 3G network and then becomes a tiny WiFi hub which sits in your pocket but gives anyone around you a connection if you’re willing to let them have the password. This means, among other things, that my iPod Touch now has a serious mobile capability. And no more drivers to worry about: if your device does WiFi, then it can talk to this device. Why can’t everything be like this?

Full disclosure: it was the inimitable Michael Dales who gave me the idea.