Battle of the MiFis… Round 1

I took a quick look at the Novatel MiFi 2352 ‘mobile hotspot’ last week, which is avaiable SIM-free now or expected on Vodafone soon.

Today, 3UK have announced their offering – available online on Thursday 17th and in stores the next day – last night… The Huwei E5830.  It’s available for £69 with a rolling 1-month contract (£15 for 5GB) or Pay-As-You-Go for £99 with 3GB of pre-loaded data, valid for 3 months.  I gave both devices the once-over for first impressions…

Features:

3UK: The MiFI unit can act as both a WiFi hotspot or a USB dongle.  Drivers are included on the device (when accessed over USB).  It claims 5 hours of battery life in-use (un-tested) and also has a micro-SD slot for use in wired mode.  The unit comes configured out of the box for secure WiFi use (shareable by up to 5 clients), but these settings can be changed using the PC client in wired mode.  No Mac drivers are supplied so, whilst it is usable Mac owners need a PC to reconfigure the device.  This is unusual (Huawei provide Mac drivers for the dongles they supply to 3UK) but the Huawei site hasn’t been updated to provide support for this device yet. The device can also act as a WiFi hub without the 3G internet connection if desired.

Novatel: The Novatel unit matches the 3UK unit spec for spec…. battery, sharing and dongle-use are the same, but without the WiFi hub feature.  However, Novatel supply Mac drivers and all configuration is done via a web browser interface so they are not required to manage the device.  Additionally the memory card slot in the Novatel is accessible over WiFi for file sharing between clients.

In use:

3UK: The device is controlled by 3 buttons on the side. They turn on power, WiFI and 3G respectively and are pressed in sequence to turn on the functions you wish to use.

Novatel: The device has a single power button.  Once switched on it auto-connects to 3G as needed.  In test it supported  a corporate VPN (Cisco) for over 4 hours.

I wasn’t able to stress test either device up to five connections in this first test, but both accepted 2 without problems and the Novatel has supported 4 laptops web browsing without issue.

Speed:

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