Word: modems
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...birthday this year. It's the same thing I've lusted after for a couple of birthdays now, and I'd trade in all the socks, ties and humorous cards about aging if only I could have it. Unfortunately, I can't, because it's a cable modem--which lets you traverse the Net at about 20 times the speed of a 56K modem--and cable-modem service is very spotty right now. In Manhattan, for example, I'd have to live between 59th and 67th Street, or in the ultra-hip East Village. Service will arrive in my slightly...
...fell in love with the Merlin wireless modem the first time I saw a picture of one in an ad. It is so adorable. The modem is built into one of those PCMCIA cards that fit into a credit-card-size slot on a laptop computer; a teeny, 2-in. antenna--so cute!--pops up to send and receive data at 19.2 kbps. That's a fairly pedestrian speed, but if it meant I could do e-mail and even browse the Web while riding the Long Island Rail Road, I'd happily put up with it. Imagine...
Novatel, whose Minstrel line of wireless modems is popular with Palm users, has just begun shipping the Merlin, which works on most PC laptops, to retail stores. The company says that at $279, it is the cheapest wireless modem around (I haven't found a cheaper one--others tend to cost $400 and up). Another plus: the Merlin draws roughly one tenth the power of a typical laptop modem. That's good news for road warriors and anyone else trying to conserve their laptop's battery...
...wireless connectivity to the Net is still in its infancy. Even with its problems, I can see how this modem might be perfect for certain users. I loved the feeling of simply turning on my laptop, shoving in the modem and being online without having to wait for a dial tone. (The Merlin is "hot swappable," which means you don't have to reboot your machine to use it.) If I were always on the road, traveling among big cities, it would be terrific never again to have to reconfigure my laptop's dial-up connections. It's also swell...
...meantime, it doesn't take much to imagine how soon the rest of us will be untethered from our modem wires. Novatel is already talking about its next-generation modem, which will abandon Seedy Petey for gsm, a cellular standard that handles data far better--and faster. That GSM-compatible Merlin, which the company expects to start selling in the middle of next year, will supposedly send and receive data at Mercury-fast 144 kbps, even from a train. I bet it'll be cute...