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For most people these days, lack of an Internet connection is an annoyance, but if you’re a member of generation Y or Z (like this author), you will understand the utter feelings of helpless rage wracking one’s body when stuck somewhere wi-fi-less, or where the only connection available costs $10 an hour – for one device.

It is for this reason that the Novatel Wireless MiFi 2200 has become a hero in our book, with the tiny pocketable unit coming to our wireless rescue on numerous occasions.

Press conference hall with no public Wi-Fi? Not to worry, just pull out the MiFi. Stuck for six hours at JFK hellhole, er, airport? No worries, the Mi-Fi is there to help the boredom fly away. Taking a long road trip with kids in the back of the car? Just switch on the Mi-Fi and watch them simultaneously fall silent as the warm comforting blanket of Internet renders their game consoles and iPads useful once more.

As well as being small enough to stick inside the pocket of your skinny jeans, the Mi-Fi is also pretty dummy proof. A big green button on the front indicates where to switch it on, which is great for the technophobic, but a little irritating when it switches on in your bag.

Battery life is fairly decent, with the little beauty running for about four hours if connecting just one device, but still over two hours with five devices connected to it. Relatively Impressive, although in the age of the 10 hour long battery life iPad, a few more hours of battery juice certainly wouldn’t hurt.

One nice feature, however, is that the MiFi does actually turn itself off (to standby mode) if it senses it isn’t being used, thus conserving a bit of battery power. The timing for self-induced sleep can be set by the user. Of course, if there’s a plug nearby, or even a USB charger, you can simply plug in the MiFi and surf away without worrying it will ever run out.

Another handy feature is that the MiFi can be tethered to your PC via USB. Simply connect it up via the MiFi’s mini USB port, plug in to your PC’s USB et voila, tethered and charging at the same time. The only drawback we could find with this method was that tethering seems to block other devices from connecting to the MiFi, but it’s a smallish price to pay.

In terms of speed, for a device sucking the web off of a cellular network, it’s really not bad at all. Using Verizon Wireless’ 3G EVDO revision A connection, pages loaded with relative ease and even uploading photos didn’t take an age as one would expect.  Of course, it does depend on where you are – we experienced bouts of no signal inside some buildings and out in the sticks – but most places we tried it in speeds ranged from very adequate to good. Another word of warning though, the more devices connect to the MiFi, the slower the speeds become, so before allowing your friends to log on, evaluate just how important their friendship really is to you.

Range on the MiFi is decent stretching to about 25-30 feet, and it’s doubtful you’d want to leave the little fellow sitting around on his own for someone to pick up and walk off with anyway.

For a device that can connect up to five others to the net, you don’t want all those other Wi-Fi scroungers in the airport lounge connecting up to your unit, which is why the option to hide SSID broadcasting is a nifty one, and controlling the device’s settings can be done quickly and easily from an easy to use web based UI. Of course, there’s a password too.

Price wise, the device itself isn’t really so bad – $270 outright or $70 on a two year contract, or just $20 after an online rebate – but the monthly data plan is a little steep, at $40 a month. Then again, unlike data plans just for your phone or for your iPad, the MiFi does allow up to five devices to connect to it, so all in all, it’s reasonable enough.

In conclusion, we’d have to say we love the size, form factor, ease of connectivity, speed and flexibility, we’re neutral on the battery life and dislike the data price, reliance on 3G only (when rival Sprint already has 4G) and slowdown when connecting more than one device.

Overall, however, we really enjoyed using the MiFi, and found it to be a real hero in certain situations (press conferences with no Wi-Fi) and for the generation Y-er, it’s probably more useful than sticking a pack of mints in your pocket, and around the same size.

Editor’s rating: 8/10