You may know this scenario very well: you're in your car, miles away from any workable Wi-Fi hotspot, and you need to check if you've received an important email. You've got WiFi capability, but where can you connect to?

WAAV presents a viable solution to this problems by launching the AirBox CM3, a wireless modem that connects to the 3G cellular network. Upload and download speeds and other general details await you when you read on.

We've gotten a few interesting bits of information on the new Sony mylo from sources close to the company. These are all unconfirmed, though, so until we hear anything official, we're tagging this report as a rumor.

Anyway, the biggest feature that we hear is coming to the second-generation Sony mylo is the possible integration of PSP software. So, will it be able to run PSP games or will it be limited to PSP firmware and applications? Whatever the extent of integration, it seems the PlayStation brand is spreading onto other Sony devices.

Another interesting tidbit is that Sony seems to be angling to get Sprint as a carrier for the new mylo. Of course, if Sony does get Sprint as a carrier, the mylo's price point could also go up as the original used WiFi networks to reduce connectivity costs. Here are more updates about the new mylo that we got from our sources:

• New E727 Half-mini card negotiation with Novatel (in-progress)
• Widget development activities (in-progress)
• SDK development (in-progress)
• Developer Program and Developer Community Website.
• RF technical support (in-progress)

Please keep in mind that these are all just rumors for now. We'll be sure to give you guys more updates as soon as we get them so keep checking back here.

Thanks to cellphone-tracking technology -  and a police force that was savvy enough to think of it - a heart transplant patient was located only moments before he was passed up for the operation.

It was Saturday afternoon when the hospital called up the state police in a last-ditch effort to inform John Paul May or his parents of the news: a heart donor was finally found. When a search for the boy or his parents turned up with no results, state police finally contacted Sprint Nextel Corp - a cellular service provider - to locate the cellphone of John's mother.

This in turn led them to a Slippery Rock University building, where a jazz concert was being held. The authorities immediately stopped the proceedings and announced that they were looking for the boy and his mother, and true enough, John Paul May was in the audience. They wasted no time in escorting John back to the hospital, amidst a shocked audience - and a deafening standing ovation.

"I've been in the entertainment business for 30 years and never had such an emotional, shocking event happen at something live," Steve Hawk, the conductor of the jazz concert being held when the incident occurred, recounts.

Lucky, lucky Milton Keynes looks like it's going to become the first British town to get high-speed wireless network internet access based on WiMAX technology. This will be quite a bump up for Milton Keynes: from limited availability of high-speed broadband to high-speed net access via WiMAX.

Unlike WiFi, WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) offers high-speed net access at multi-megabit speeds over vast areas, instead of just a few meters. WiMAX is seen to be a tough competition for WiFi, as it's already being used in thousands of hotspots around the world and has far more extensive wireless coverage than WiFi.

However, as compared to WiFi, WiMAX still remains widely unused. This is due to the need for expensive hardware and the specifications needed to use it in conjunction with wireless roaming plus other wireless technologies are still yet incomplete. In the US, Sprint Nextel announced its plans to build a national WiMAX network that will cost the company $3 billion.


Net connection firm Pipex will be responsible for administering a trial run of a Wimax network, which will be used to take broadband access to the townsfolk that could not get internet connection. If things go well, Pipex said that the Wimax system should be up and running by the end of this year and hopefully deployed in eight UK towns by 2008. A detailed outline of Pipex's plans is not available yet, not for at least four weeks.

Montclair State University in Cincinnati implemented a mandatory cell phone rule in which school authorities can locate their students on and off campus. This may easily be seen as an invasion of privacy in that the university is granted the authority to track down their students, thus hampering the students' freedom to go wherever and whenever one wants.

Ron Chicken, a student in the said university, used to hate the idea of him being tracked down by the university administration. But according to him, as time passed, more and more students became used to the idea and even favored its implementation because it also provides them with security. According to the university, nine out of ten of their students carry cellphones and rarely, or no longer, use landline phones. This means that school authorities would have to adapt to this technological development and use it to maintain lines of communication with their students.

However, the Montclair State University made it clear that the tracking program for their students is voluntary, and that even if the students do decide to avail of the service, they can deactivate it any time of the day. Students can activate what they call the "Guardian" service if ever they feel threatened on campus. The said university came up with a voluntary program that offers freshmen a free mobile phone, but the students would have to pay for the services they would avail of. Montclair partnered with Rave Wireless Inc. to develop the software applications for their students' cell phones. Sprint Nextel Corp. provided the handsets as well as the wireless services.

More and more universities are pondering on whether they should drop the traditional use of landline phones to contact their students especially in emergency cases, and move on to tapping into the cellphone as a medium for maintaining communication lines with their students. While email and landline phones still prove to be useful in contacting the students, it is ultimately the cellphone that every student carries with him constantly. The Morrisville State College in New York has also implemented mandatory school-issued cellphone handsets as a replacement for landlines in its dorms.

However, some schools and universities remain ambivalent about the issue because of lawsuits that may ensue if the traditionally reliable landline services are removed from the dormitories. Austin College in Texas is keeping the dorm landlines for safety reasons but will ultimately rely on email to keep in touch with its students.

The cellphone tracking program can prove to be a very useful tool for universities and schools to communicate with their students and guarantee their safety especially within the campus. The important thing perhaps is that the students are given a choice on the issue and are consulted before universities implement such programs.

The days when ultra mobile portables have had the "ball and chain" by tethering their EV-DO phones/PDAs are over, as Sprint and Franklin Wireless offers a revolutionary product called CDU-550, a USB EV-DO Card. This will enable Tablet PC plus Mac laptop and desktop users that do not have a PCMCIA card slot to connect to the Internet or company information with broadband-like download speeds using Sprint Mobile Broadband Services operating on the Sprint Power Vision Network.

Not much information is known about this card, aside from claims that early tests on this product have shown remarkable speeds. Whether this product is a sure winner or not, we'll see about that. As for your viewing pleasure, we included pictures here...enjoy!

Dell is the first manufacturer to release a version of the Novatel XV620 express EV-DO wireless card for laptops. Verizon and Sprint are currently the only two service providers capable of providing EV-DO coverage, via their extensive EV-DO capable networks.

The card is listed on the Dell site for $161, without service of any kind of course. Based on the 34mm form factor, this card will fit both the 34 and 54mm sizes of the express card slots currently available.

Verizon and Sprint both plan to offer a branded version of this same card to their own customers in the near future. This is good news for those who own notebooks that only have express card slots and no others. I am using EV-DO right now and I can expect real world speeds between 400 and 900KBps in the down direction and a maximum of around 300KBps uploading.

While currently EV-DO service is expensive and the results are not always perfect, EV-DO brings us one step closer to having wireless broadband everywhere we go! Hopefully the industry can find a balance between profits for providers and customer satisfaction that will keep everyone happy.

This long awaited release is finally one week away. Many people were surprised when they realized that their new laptop was sporting a new format of PCMCIA wireless slot that would not have a compatible wireless card to go with it for months to come.

However, if tests of the pre-release version of the device, tentatively named Novatel XV620, give an accurate indication of the abilities of the release model; the new device will have appeal, as it performs at an equal or higher level than competitive devices (like the Kyocera KR1).

The new release from Novatel just recently received approval from the FCC and PCMCIA and is en route to retail locations with a release scheduled for the first week of July.

With more and more products leaving factories configured to take advantage of the EV-DO networks set up by firms like Sprint and Verizon; EV-DO is becoming an increasingly viable option for those seeking mobile access to the Internet with a decent amount of throughput in each direction.

Even though I already bought a wireless EV-DO router that converts EV-DO into wifi, I will probably still buy a Novatel XV620 because it's small and would make for one less thing for me to carry when I'm out. Dell, the first major manufacturer to adopt the express card standard on a large scale, has announced that it will also sell a re-branded version of the Novatel XV620 called the Dell Wireless 5700 Mobile Broadband Express Card starting at the end of this week.

The card is in 34mm format which fits both 54mm and 34mm slots and is the smallest of the current express card formats. Drivers and compatibility for Mac users are currently merely an afterthought for most mobile EV-DO solutions, but with the expected increase in popularity in store, the format should become more universally accepted in the near future.