A rough indication of size

The reasons for buy it are twofold. Firstly the internal GPRS modem in my Ubisurfer has gone down, rendering it useless without another means of connectivity (at least until Datawind’s tech support sort me out a replacement or fix); and secondly, my trust Huawei E220 USB broadband modem is being pressed into service as a permanet net connection for my Linux box running a game server (until Virgin can final get around to installing proper broadband for me).

That’s enough of me justifying the purchase, let’s have a look at the thing.

There it is, all lit up like Blackpool

Ooh, shiny. So, pop in the sim card and battery, plug it in to the charger and wait for twelve hours. Thumb the power button for two seconds and on come the five lights.

Ah, you’re thinking, there are four lights! Well, the fifth light (in the middle, not shown) only comes on when you first power up the device or if you feel an irresistable pull to a a foreign land (roaming).

If you’re really insteresting in what the four status lights mean, I’m sure you can find out elsewhere.

Thumb the wifi button for two seconds, then the Saturn button (only my name for it, as it has a little picture of a ringed planet on it) for two seconds and if all is well you’ll be able to connect to the internet through the thing.

Assuming all it well, that is. Sometimes it isn’t. Even though i’m a bit of a 3 fanboy (nine phones and two modems over the years), I still have issues with them. Firstly 3 is a crap name for a company, Whampoa would have sounded cooler; and secondly the coverage where I currently live is ropey at times.

Coverage map of ST17 XXX

The darker shade represents indoor/outdoor coverage, whilst the lighter shade shows outdoor coverage only. The pointer shows where I live. Not shown is a 3g modem gaffa taped to my window in order to get a good signal.

Besides the device itself, the box contains a short USB lead and a charger. The charger is, obviously, for charging the thing, and the USB cable is for three things.

1. using it as a storage device if a microSD card (not supplied) is inserted into it
2. using it as a USB modem
3. using the configuration program.

The configuation program (which installs straight from the device itself – nice) allows you to do all the usual wifi router based things: DHCP config, port forwarding, changing the SSID to something rude, changing the password to something you’ll actually remember.

Connecting to the thing is easy with any most wifi devices. So far I’ve managed to get two laptops (WinXP and Linux), the Ubisurfer and a borrowed iPod Touch running concurrently. I know the iPhone works ok (slightly faster that the phone’s built in 3g modem), and I’m sure the iPad will work. (Does anyone want to lend me one to test?)

Sadly, I could not get a laptop running Hexxeh’s Flow build of Chromium OS. But I put this down to Flow failing to recognised the Dell’s WiFi hardware.

Its a great little device. Go and buy one now. £49 from Three on their PAYG plan.

So, all that remains for me to do now are the customary speed test, using www.speedtest.net, as ever.

Firstly using the old E220 USB Modem:

E220 USB Results

And now using the E5830 Mifi:

E3850 Mifi Results

I clearly have a winner here, but your mileage may vary.

Finally, here are the frankly deplorable results taken recently from my sister’s Orange Home Broadband link recently:

Orange are shite

So, what is the UbiSurfer? In short, its a cheap netbook running an implementation of Linux. Oh, with a years free internet access thrown in.

More about that later, but first the specs:

• 7 inch 800×400 TFT screen
• 128MB RAM, 1GB Solid State disk
• Full QWERTY keyboard and Touchpad mouse
• Push-Push SD card socket and 2 USB ports (the box says 3, but I have 2 and a connector I’ve never seen before)
• Measures 222x165x29.5mm, weighs 700g
• Battery life provides 4 hours active use and 4 hours

Note the lack of a spec concerning the processor. Apparently it is some form of ARM 500Mhz job.

Applications wise you get the usual word processing and spreadsheet offerings, and a collections of email clients, PDF readers and the like, all GPLed programs.

For web browsing you have Mozilla IceWeasel (Firefox), which only works when connected via a Wifi hotspot, and the UbiSurfer browser itself.
And now we get to the main (only) reason that I bought this thing: free internet access. Included in the price of the device is 30 hours access per month (for a year) to Vodaphone’s GPRS network, via an onboard modem. As we all know, GPRS isn’t exactly lightening fast, but Datawind claim that any web page can be loaded in 7 seconds.

This is supposed to be achieved by Datawind pre-rendering the web pages on their servers (in Canada) and sending them on in a compressed form to the UbiSurfer browser, which then decodes and displays them.
Ok, that sounds fine in theory, but in practice its not so good.
Datawind’s own site (www.datawind.com) takes about fifteen seconds to load, and more complex site such a Google Mail can take up to a minute to fully render.
This pre-rendering process also throws up problems when entering data onto a web page. Tabbing between fields can take up to ten seconds.
Obviously these problems don’t occur when using IceWeasel and connecting via a Wifi hotspot.

But, oddly, my biggest complaint about the UbiSurfer browser is about the hideous splash screen which also comes up when you disconnect, thus preventing you from viewing pages offline. Here it is in all its glory.

Just look at the smug pissweasel. Those grass stains are going to raise questions in the office after lunch. Luckily you can overwrite the this image with something less irritating.

I shall continue to persevere with this thing, in the hope that I can find a use for it.

Here is the map:

View Larger Map

Download the file

Firstly, where I currently live:

And Now, where I will be living in 2 weeks:

Oh dear.

Well, now I’ve gone and bought a 3 Mobile Internet dongle thing. Specifically, the Huawei E220.

So, what do you get for your 50 quid?

Apart from the device itself, the DVD style box contains a SIM card, a manual that I didn’t bother even opening, two USB cables and some padding that I didn’t bother to eat.

No installation CD? Nope. The clever little chappy installs all it needs from an built in memory stick type thingummy which pretend to be a CDROM. Take a not, USB device makers: This is the way forward.

One of the USB cables is a standard 6 inch one, which works ok but means that the modem is hanging about where I usually have my mouse (never having got used to the crappy touchpads that most laptops have). The other is a much longer affair with two Type A connectors at one end, just in case your computer can’t push enough power out from one socket. This is fairly useless to me, as the added cable length means the device needs the two plugs to be connected, and the two USB sockets on my Dell are on opposite sides of the case. It works great if I have my “media slice” connected, as that gives me 2 extra USB sockets on the back, but it also triples the weight of the machine, so I usually leave it to gather dust.

I’m using the long cable to connect to my telephone instead.

What you probably can’t tell from the photo, is that the sim card holder is held in place with sellotape. It won’t fall out during normal use, but did pop out a few times while in my bag. Hence the classic British engineering fix.

So, how fast is it?

Firstly, here is what I got through my phone on a good day:


And here is what the new dongle gives me:

A bit faster, as you can see. I managed to get up to about 2900kbps by standing outside the house and getting a clear line of sight to the nearest transmitter, which is about 300 yards away.

With this “proper” internet modem connected, rather than the mobile phone, Three aren’t restricting what I can access. So now I can waste my time on b3ta, and won’t get an electronic telling off if I accidentally try and watch some young flibbertigibbet shaking her udders on YouTube.

So what does it cost to run?

Well, you have a choice: £10 for 1gb, £15 for 3gb or £25 for 7gb.

A nice range of prices for you there. Being a bit skint, I opted to only spash out a tenner, and my 1gb lasted a week.

Luckily, you can stick on as many addons as you have the money for, and don’t need to wait until with end of the month. Next time, however, I will be getting the £25 top up (assuming that I get hold of some money).

I’m quite happy with it, currently. When I get the chance, I’m going to have a wander in to the countryside, and see how well the modem (and indeed the AMOI phone) function when quite far from a transmitter.

Skype:

MSN:

PC Connectivity:

MoDem:

Running costs:

So whats wrong with it?

Verdict?

Anyway, on with the motley……

This week I got a bit drunk and bought a new phone, a 3 Skype phone. In reality, its an Amoi (no wok included) WP-S1, and this is what it looks like…

Snazzy, eh?

For £49 its not really a bad bit of kit. True, it is on the 3 network, but after being frigged about by O2 and Virgin over the last two weeks I’ll try any alternative.

So, what does it do?

Well. It does all your normal phone crap, plus it allegedly automatically uses Skype when you want it to. I say allegedly as I can’t even get mine to log in using my Skype details. And 3′s usually unhelpful customer support have no idea what to do.(But at least they can’t beat the O2 monkey who asked me, twenty minutes into our conversation about why my GPRS had been cancelled, if I owned a mobile phone. No, Sherlock, I can process GSM signals in my head.)

Anyway, thats not important. What can it do?

For me the big win is that you can use it as a modem and get ‘net access. True, its only about 116Kbps, but that better than I was getting from O2. The downside to this is that the software supplied completely screws up all your existing modem drivers. Not a big loss for most people, but bloody annoying nonetheless.

Sadly the internet service is somewhat restricted. Mail and Web services seem okay (with exceptions), but thats it. FTP is blocked, as are MSN Messenger (probably a good thing) and no gaming stuff will work.

For some reason, POP access to my gmail account won’t work, but I can still access the gmail website. Odd.

Access to sites like B3ta are blocked, but thats probably a good thing for me.

A big problem is Facebook. I was never a big fan of it (see elsewhere) until I got the phone. Now I’m on it all the time, mainly because you can access straight from the phone. This is my biggest U-turn since I suddenly decided that VW campers were indeed a bit cool.

The FTP thing is annoying, as I have to update these pages via FTP. I means that I have to go to the pub and use the WIFI machine. Like I needed an excuse.

So… ultimate verdict, is it any good?

Yup. Best phone i’ve had in ages.

Update: Yay! FTP / IM / Flickr uploader…. it all works now!

Another update: How am I getting on with it? Amoi WP-S1 3/Skype Phone – 5 months later