Verizon's New 4G Mobile Hotspots: Which One Works Best?

Mobile hotspots like Novatel’s popular MiFi 2200 have been greeted warmly by tech users and have sold well. They simplify things by providing our various devices with Internet connectivity under one data service bill. And they’re small and superportable.

But mobile hotspots have often connected devices to the Internet at relatively slow speeds, until now. A pair of new mobile hotspots that run on Verizon’s fast new 4G LTE network--Samsung’s 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot and Novatel’s MiFi 4510L--have become available, and they truly do live up to being ten times faster than their 3G predecessors.

The two devices and their accompanying data plans are priced the same. The hotspots each sell for $100 with a two-year contract at the Verizon Wireless site. For data service, you can buy a 5GB plan for $50 per month or a 10GB plan for $80 per month. Both plans charge $10 for every gigabyte of data you use over your monthly limit.

So which device is the better buy? I break them down feature by feature and pick a winner at the end (feel free to skip down). In a nutshell, I found a number of small differences--and one big one--that might make all the difference when choosing between the two.