Not necessarily. Mobile carrier Freedompop offers a limited amount of free data for tablet users, with no strings attached (but a few caveats). What happened to T-Mobile's Free Data for Life option?

How do those different usage patterns end up affecting mobile data consumption? One recent report claims some pretty big differences between how much data we use on tablets versus smartphones.

A mobile hotspot, for those not familiar, is a feature on your phone that allows you to share its data connection with other devices, like a computer or tablet or TV or other WiFi-equipped device.