Ok, carrying over from this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=367802, if I want to use a cell phone to connect my laptop to the net, I need to sign up for the cell provider’s data plan. I don’t currently have a cell phone (hard to believe, but true), so I can go with any provider I want.
The question is: which one? My first priority is something that has a reasonably low monthly cost. The speed of the connection is not that important; I will mostly use it to receive and send email, and maybe a very little bit of browser, so a speed equivalent of a dialup modem would be just fine. It’s not something that I’ll be using a lot, maybe two or three times a week for probably no more than a half an hour. But, I really do need to be able to send and receive the email directly on my laptop; even the coolest email-ready cell phone would not fit my needs.
As for coverage, I’ll mostly be in the San Jose, CA area, so I’m assuming that any cell company will cover it. However, there may be the rare occasion when I would be out of the area, and I’d of course want the connection to work. This will happen really rarely, so if I had to pay souped-up roaming charges just for those occasions, I could handle it. But I’d like the basic, non-roaming cost to be reasonable.
So, anyone have any recommendations? Any other questions I need to answer? Having Bluetooth connectivity between the phone and the laptop would be great, but I’m assuming that’s a function of the particular phone, and isn’t really related to the specific data plan.