Thank you.

I'd still recommend using wi-fi for that, emails and browsing would normally be done at a coffee shop, hotel, etc. Much cheaper. It's nice to have always-on data, but across two countries for a short period of time it really does get expensive, an unneeded luxury.

About the T-Mobile option, it works on their prepaid SIMs & costs 1.49 for 24 hours which would be deducted out of the account's available balance. You would purchase a day pass every day when you are ready to use it that day. The data is claimed to work only on the native T-Mobile network. This is likely the cheapest form of temporary prepaid data available in the US at this time, especially if y7ou plan to use it a lo during each day.

T-Mobile prepaid works in both countries. However, if you use T-Mobile in Canada it will cost you 69¢/minute. Fido/Rogers roams in the US at $2.00 per minute (ouch!)

If you are browsing mobile websites, 2G (EDGE) may be acceptable, but if you go to regular (desktop-designated) websites, 2G is a pain. E.g. opening cnn.com generates a data volume of 1.1MB. With full EDGE-speed (236 KBit/s) this would take half a minute to load. However if you realistically consider average bandwidth to reach not more than 100 KBit/s this would mean at least a whole minute of waiting until the opened page has been completely downloaded.

And to think that not that many years ago, I was thrilled to be able to do my web surfing via GPRS, and I didn't find the speed to be unacceptable.

Of course, those were the days when dialup Internet was still reasonably usable, too.

Website bloat sucks if you ask me - sites could be a lot smaller than they are and no less useful.