Connected Without A Contract

Manjoo touts Karma, a mobile hotspot device. Its main advantage:

Karma charges $14 for 1GB of broadband, which is enough for a few days of heavy Web surfing (or several hours if you’re watching videos or streaming music). Karma’s plan has two major advantages over pay-as-you-go data services offered by large carriers.

First, Karma’s coverage doesn’t expire every month. For instance, my Verizon iPad’s 1GB plan resets every month—if I only use half of my gig, I lose the rest on the first of the month. Karma’s plan never resets. You can pay $14 and use your gigabyte over as long a time as you like—you can use 500 MB in June, nothing in July and August, and then 500 MB in September, and you’ll still have spent only $14 for access.

The second selling point:

Every Karma hotspot is “open”—that is, if you turn it on in an airport or coffee shop, other people can connect to it and begin surfing the Web. But get this: When they connect, they don’t use “your” data. Instead, when a new Karma user joins your hotspot for the first time, you and that user each get 100MB of free data access. The more people that you bring to Karma, the more free data you get.