Innovation comes in a lot of forms. Sometimes there's a totally new product or service that sends ripples through the industry. At other times, it's taking two (or more) existing services and combining them to come up with something truly unique.

We're particularly excited about Mi-Fi – the marketing moniker for personal Wi-Fi. Using equipment from Novatel – the Wireless Mi-Fi 2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot – both Verison and Sprint are rolling out a cool new service that combines cellular data service with a Wi-Fi router.

This product/service combination is packed as a tiny device that can connect to the cellular service with a nominal speeds around 400Kbps for uploads and 1.5Mbps for downloads according to some sources. We're eagerly awaiting our evaluation unit so we can report our first-hand experience. And this is in a form factor that's, according to Verizon, roughly the size of a stack of eight credit cards and weighs just over two ounces.

From the online specifications and Q&A available at Verizon's Web site, the router appears to be quite functional, and it supports up to five Wi-Fi users. The micro-hub can be powered from a USB port or a wall charger, and it includes its own battery power that's rated for four hours of active use per charge. (Extra batteries are available.)

List price for the device is $149, but there is a rebate available if you sign up for a term commitment on a data plan. Cost for the most attractive data plan is $59.99 per month with an allowance of 5GB of throughput and an overage cost of five cents per megabyte. (You know our feelings on metered vs. unlimited plans, but that's been discussed adequately for the time being. However, the overage charge in this case is five rather than 25 cents per megabyte.)

We see this as being especially cool because it eliminates the one-modem-per-machine limitation of current cellular services, and we'll be discussing the implications of this in the next newsletter. In the meantime, we'd also love for you to join the discussion of this technology here.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.