One problem with our “always on, always connected” lifestyle – and one we’ve grown to expect with our 24/7 high-speed connection at home and at work -- is that it can be a drag to find a “hotspot” when you’re out and about.

Rather than booting up a laptop at a café, airport lounge or hotel, many Canadians are taking advantage of their increasingly speedy cell phone connections – thanks to technologies such as EV-DO, EDGE and HSDPA – to log onto the Internet wherever they may be. Yes, even while on a moving train or in the back of a cab, which is something you can’t do with WiFi.

These products fall into two camps: one is a card you can snap into your laptop (usually via its PC Card or Express Card slot), such as the Kyocera Passport and Sierra Wireless products, which let you surf the Net on your laptop by using your cell carrier’s data network. The other is using your existing cell phone – by tethering it to your laptop’s USB port, you can use your phone as a modem for your computer. Because you don’t need to buy any additional hardware, many prefer this route of logging onto the Net via a laptop.

Speaking of laptops, surfing the Net and reading email with attachments is a lot easier on a big screen (opposed to say, a 2-inch BlackBerry display), not to mention typing on a large QWERTY keyboard trumps using a teeny keyboard or keypad. OK, so cell phone speeds are not quite as fast as a Wi-Fi broadband connection (EV-DO, for example, ranges from 400 to 700 kbps, on average). However, you can’t beat the convenience of logging line virtually anywhere and anytime.

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