We had a chance to swing by the XOHM booth and get a taste of what Mobile WiMax technology will offer once it starts rolling out to select cities beginning this April. The promise: a zippy 2 to 4 Mbps per second on the downlink and 1 to 2 Mbps per second on the uplink. XOHM operates somewhat independently of Sprint, but many believe that this high-speed data network is the carrier’s best shot at leapfrogging the competition. And it has some pretty big players betting on the success of Mobile WiMax, from Motorola and Samsung to Nokia and Intel. We had a little hands-on time with some enabled devices around the booth and generally liked what we saw. The highlight: XOHM-ready Asus Eee PC.

First up was a PC card from Motorola, which in a demo was streaming TV to a notebook using a remote Slingbox. The stream looked pretty decent, but the onscreen speedometer said it was only about 400 Kbps. That’s hardly in the range of what XOHM is capable of. However, surfing the Web on another laptop with the same PC Card plugged in while at the booth downloaded Web pages pretty fast–about 6 seconds for The New York Times to appear and about 14 seconds to completely download. We also saw a more compact ExpressCard XOHM card, which will be able to find a home in more modern notebooks with that slot.

Next up was an Asus Eee PC with Mobile WiMax baked in, an OQO model 02, and a mobile gaming device. The gaming gadget was there to demonstrate that XOHM will enable all sorts of consumer electronics devices, in this case for anytime, anywhere online play a la Xbox live. Only the Eee PC was working at the time of our visit, so we took it for a quick spin. Pages loaded quickly (our own site took about 10 seconds), and we could definitely see ourselves blogging with a device like this at next year’s show. That would be pretty sweet, so long as the coverage is up to par.