Neil of Neil’s World has been using his dongle in his lunch hour hang-out, and although he gets a good HSDPA signal ‘equivalent to lower-end DSL or cable-based broadband packages’, he’s found that web pages can be slow to download. Neil has realised that ’stealth’ downloads could be the culprit, as a whole host of sites eat into his bytes as soon as he connects - from Firefox updating and Plaxo synchronising to iScrobbler, um, scrobbling - and so recommends getting a mobile broadband modem with at least 1GB data transfer to help handle the sneaky scheduled tasks. He also reminds dongle users to keep an eye on their battery, as finds it drains an extra half-hour or so; read the full post here.

Over at One Man and His Blog, Adam has found that his dongle connects reliably both on the train and in Cafe Nero. However, as a ‘pic-heavy blogger’ he has noticed that uploading photos can take a frustrating amount of time.

As a download diva who throws a tantrum worthy of Van Halen faced with a brown M&M if forced to wait more than a couple of seconds for my computer to obey, I’m definitely going to freeze stealth downloads on my laptop when I’m on the move to keep things speedy. Anyone else got some top time-saving tips?