Apparently feeling a little celebratory after negotiating lower wholesale rates for voice and data, British MVNO Virgin Mobile has said that it intends to start offering broadband data cards some time in the fourth quarter of the year. In the UK, Virgin operates on top of T-Mobile's wireless backbone, so customers of the new data service should have a pretty nice HSDPA footprint with which to work -- a totally upside-down version of the US picture, where Virgin uses Sprint, offers no data cards (hell, they barely admit the existence of data on their handsets), and rocks CDMA to the core. Weird how the world works sometimes.

Bring on the Chinese hardware! Hot on the heels of ZTE's victory making North American inroads on Telus with its D90 flip phone, Huawei's next, launching its EC360 data card on Alltel. To be fair, the EC360 is a little more boring than the Fastap-equipped D90 -- it's just an EV-DO PC Card -- though the 2.4Mbps of downstream speed Alltel's promising is music to our ears. Grab it now for a penny shy of $190, free after rebates and activation.

Helio has officially cut down its Hybrid EV-DO / WiFi data card down in its prime. Actually, we're not sure if the Hybrid was cut down before its prime, in its prime, or past its prime -- but any way you slice it, it's toast. The move is going down pretty quickly, too; no new Hybrids are being sold, and existing customers will be switched off as of May 8 (though they're "welcome" to keep the deactivated card, according to the announcement). Folks who also have a voice line activated with Helio will be given a month of free service for their troubles, but we imagine that's little consolation to the poor laptops mercilessly stripped of hotspot and EV-DO access in the discontinuation's aftermath. Was it Helio's stingy 160MB limit that ultimately lead to the Hybrid's demise? We may never know -- but given Helio's cozy relationship with Earthlink and Boingo, we'd be pretty surprised if the MVNO were out of the dedicated data business for good.

[Thanks, Brent S.]

Not content with simply making some of the best smartphones on the planet, Taiwanese powerhouse HTC is now looking to get into the data card game, with the company prepping a new HSDPA card through its BandRich subsidiary. The C100, as it's known, will offer download speeds up to 7.2Mbps where available, and is said to be just the first of many mobile modems BandRich is planning. DigiTimes is reporting that the C100 will be priced north of €200 ($269), so although we don't yet know when/where these are gonna drop, it looks like you'll have to part with at least a few C notes if this model lands in your neck of the woods.

[Via jkOTR]

Rogers Wireless seems to be on a bit of a binge of late with HSDPA devices, and with a fledgling 3G network in the cards, that's just fine with us. Announced today is the Option GT MAX "7.2 Ready" data card; as you may have guessed, the "7.2 Ready" refers to the card's ability to be upgraded from 3.6Mbps to 7.2Mbps when the network supports it. The GT MAX card features quad band GSM / GPRS / EDGE, triple band HSDPA / UMTS, and an interesting butterfly-style fold away antenna that saves you having to pop the card out when not in use. Thanks to Option's "Advanced Radio Technology" (ART) with receive diversity and equalization to help improve both signal reception and reduce interference, the card is apparently garnering 50 percent greater throughput speeds in field trials. Pick it up for $149 CDN on a three-year contract.

[Via PR Newswire]

They can't claim to be the first to rock HSUPA outright, but Belgian outfit Option appears to be the first to hit up the 3G+ tech via an honest-to-goodness data card. As a reminder, HSUPA is the de facto successor to HSDPA in the GSM family tree, leaving the plenty-fast HSDPA downlink speeds be to concentrate on boosting the uplink; it's capable of topping out at a whopping 5.7Mbps up, compared to HSDPA's measly 384kbps. Of course, those crazy upload times do us no good without somethin' we can plug into our lappies; that's where Option comes into the equation, demonstrating a prototype card using Qualcomm's MSM7200 chipset in a variety of real-life scenarios (including a car traveling at 50 km/h), managing a respectable 1.3Mbps up and 2.7Mbps down. Now that testing is in full swing, Option says we can expect commercial HSUPA products from their camp in the first half of 2007.

Before we get you too excited, fair warning: there's not an ExpressCard to be found in the bunch. Instead, Sprint's decided to add another two PC Cards to the previously launched Novatel S720, giving them a grand total of three EV-DO Revision A-compliant data cards ahead of their network rollout -- it's just a shame all three devices fit in the same kind of slot. At any rate, we were always told not to look a gift horse in the mouth, so we're going to put a sock in it and thank Sprint for giving us options: first up is the value of the bunch, Pantech's PX-500, which'll clock in for a nice, round $0 on two-year contract. Next, the AirCard 595 from Sierra Wireless will match the S720's pricing, going out the door for $100 after signing on the dotted line. Expect both cards to drop before the end of the year, but until someone can show that the Pantech is demonstrably worse than its stablemates, we're really liking the sound of "free."