Tethering your iPhone is a great alternative to expensive hotel WiFi, un-secured and unreliable free hotspots, or signing a 2-year contract for mobile broadband service that you only need from time to time.

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With my health on the mend, I posted some travelogue articles via hotel WiFi and made a couple of phone calls that came through with impressive clarity on the Droid II Global phone that Verizon lent me for the trip.

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Imagine: You could be the lucky grand prize winner who takes home round trip airfare to San Francisco for you and a friend, three nights at a swanky hotel, a WiFi-equipped Samsung WB850F digital camera to capture the fun, and a pair of coveted Expand tickets.

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The 'Teleport Me' feature is especially beneficial for browsing from hotel networks, public WiFi hotspots, or other untrusted broadband connections.

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As you can see in the video above, games load fairly quickly and run with intermittent pixelation -- which we were assured was caused by the hotel's meager WiFi connection.

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You can actually see this demonstrated in our video after the break, where we streamed an episode from NBC's Saturday Night Live website through a WiFi network (but the Plair can also create its own hotspot for direct WiFi connection, which is handy for avoiding slow hotel networks).

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Let's face it: many free WiFi hotspots are tacked on as bullet point items to get customers into a shop or hotel, without much concern for quality high enough that it keeps visitors coming back.

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