Speed The average peak was about 200kbps, it was slightly more in some places and less in others, depending on signal strength and traffic. However, I found Japan's 3G signal and wireless speeds to be much more consistent than what we have in the United States.

Location On subway / trains: Most of japan's underground subway stations have reception. However, the subway tunnels do not. While riding the shinkansen, I was able to get reception on the entire Tokaido line without problems. A key exception was while traveling through tunnels, but these were relatively few and far between, and the device had little problem reconnecting to the network on its own after the tunnels had passed.

Applications Mobile devices: I found the device perfect for use with mobile devices such as the iPad and iPhone. Without having purchased AT&T's international internet access package, which can be hundreds of dollars for a very limited data budget (in the low hundreds of megabytes), I wasn't able to get any signal on my iPad. However, using the pocket WiFi device, I was able to have unlimited high speed internet access basically anywhere in Japan. A google maps page load, for example, can take about three megabytes to load the map/directions between two given points. With the device, I was able to use my phone to look up directions and find out where I was—even though the GPS in apple devices is supported by cell tower locations, GPS worked beautifully on the iPhone and iPad when using the pocket WiFi device—for example, the iPad was able to track my route on surface trains and the Shinkansen in real time. Though some knowledge of Japanese is required (since the names of the stations and train lines were displayed in Japanese), it is possible to use Google Maps' public transportation directions feature to plot a route and itinerary for the Tokyo Metro or JR lines using the iPad, iPhone, or a computer. In fact, using the pocket WiFi device extended the battery life of my iPad and iPhone over what they would have in the US, since WiFi takes less power than the 3G modems built into those devices.

Multiple devices I had no problem connecting four devices to the WiFi spot at once--the internet speeds were fast enough to support reasonable browsing on all devices.

Email and surfing The device was perfect for this, the surfing experience was nearly as good as some wired broadband connections in the US. Pages loaded quickly, push email worked great.

Video streaming The speeds were sufficient to support video streaming from sites like YouTube, or with a sufficiently fast proxy, Hulu (that service is not available from a Japanese IP address due to streaming rights issues).

Exchange I was able to sync with my Exchange server using the device.

VPNs I was able to get onto my school VPN in order to access academic literature I needed to read while abroad.

VoIP I did not get to use VoIP on the device, sadly. I suspect that it would work well, though--I'd recommend testing it out with Skype to see if calls could be sent and received.

Battery life: Battery life on the device was about two hours. This is not two hours of use, this was two hours of continuous operation whether or not the internet was actually being accessed. I was able to extend the effective battery life by turning off the WiFi broadcasting and the internet connection, leaving the device in idle mode. This, however, requires the device to be easily accessible every time one makes this adjustment, and the process takes about fifteen seconds, which is not insignificant while moving around on a busy subway system like Tokyo's. With the Huawei device it would be less useful for receiving calls due to the short battery life.