Well - it finally arrived on Wednesday and I took it home to set it up. That should have been a straightforward process except that the dealer didn't know that he should have supplied a dedicated SIM card for the VMC card! Back to the shop, SIM card fitted and the software intallation was pretty easy. But then I could only send/receive SMS - so after a few tortuous phonecalls to Vodafone I elicited that the SIM card should have been GPRS-enabled, but hadn't been. That can take up to 48 hours - so another shout at Vodafone and all was finally well.....
So does it work? Yes, very well. Even with just 1-2 bars of signal strength it connected at 57.6 Kbps; that's better than the 45-46Kbps I get on my land line!
Only minor points: 1. The laptop speakers pick up a bit of the mobile phone buzz during data exchange and 2. The 'Vodafone dashboard' only fills 80% of the screen with 1024x768 pixels correctly set.
But this promises to be an excellent toy - no more faffing about with wires plugged into the mobile phone and then trying to find a data-supporting network with at best 9.6 Kbps connectivity.