Well, it's been a couple of weeks and a couple of trips out of town, and I now feel qualified to rate the Verizon V640 Broadband Wireless card for Macs (known as the EVDO ExpressCard).
The short version: it's now working well everywhere I need it to.
The longer version: it's been glitchy getting going, and still has problems. The first problem:
After a week or so of using it successfully in Austin and San Antonio, I lost connectivity. I called Verizon, and had to explain to the tech person what a V640 is, that I couldn't possibly be calling from that device. I was told there seemed to be an outage in my area.
I was on hold for so long I forgot about the call, and disconnected the call.
I called back, again explained that the V640 wasn't a phone, and this time was directed to tech support. I basically had to reinstall everything, after which the card worked fine. There was no outage after all.
A week later, before I left for Wisconsin, I was synching up my Macs, and for the first time tried to send mail from the laptop. No go. I could send mail from my .mac account, but not from any other email addresses. My Time Warner SMTP server wasn't working.
Again I called Verizon. Again I explained the device. I was told I needed to register separately for SMTP server access. It would take several days to implement this. Several days!? The rep told me to check for messages on the device for a temporary password. Messages on the device? Apparently if I use their software to connect (which I didn't and don't) there was a place for Verizon to message me. I loaded up the software. I found no messages, indeed no place for messages.
So I had connectivity on my trip, but was only able to send from a single email account. I never heard from verizon about smtp service, and was simply too busy to deal with it. And now that I'm home, it's not as urgent. But I do need to deal with it. Seems like a crazy system, not automatically offering access.
I have 2 other complaints about the V640: I've had several hard crashes while it's live. At first I thought I was just crashing when I had the card in and I ran out of juice. But no, just this afternoon I had a fresh charge with the card in. I closed the Mac, and when I reopened it 15 minutes later, it was crashed. The other issue: it's hell on battery life. I get just over 4 hours on a charge with Bluetooth disabled, and not even 2 with the card running.
Still, I can get online everywhere I've tried except for at 35,000 feet somewhere over Missouri. Had to try, though :)