I’m taking part in a trial of 3’s mobile broadband offering, courtesy of 3 and 3mobilebuzz.
What this means is that I get to play with 3’s mobile broadband service during the next three months or so, for free; in return, the folks at 3mobilebuzz want me to write a bit about my experiences.
3’s offering comes in the form of a Huawei E169G USB broadband modem, which arrived last weekend. It’s part of a good-looking price deal that 3 has just launched.
(Aside: it’s curious that, other than a few pics, I can find no reference to this particular modem anywhere on 3’s website. And googling it doesn’t turn up any meaningful info, not even on the manufacturer’s website. Is it so new?)
Obviously the first thing I wanted to do was to install it. I want to see how easy, or difficult, it is to do that. The little manual that comes with the package says it’s dead easy: basically, plug it in to a USB port and it will set itself up.
True plug ‘n’ play.
So after inserting the supplied SIM card into the modem, I did just that – plugged it in and let it do it’s thing.
How easy was it?
In a word… well, easy. I video’d what I did. Now, watching a video of a hardware or software installation can be a bit like watching paint dry: nothing interesting really happens during much of it.
But bear with me on this. The video is just under 10 minutes and it’s real time – what you see is exactly the process I went through to get the modem up and running on my Sony Vaio SZ4XWN/C laptop running Windows Vista Business edition.
It would have taken about a minute or two less if I hadn’t been wielding the video camera with one hand and clicking on things with the other.
Take a look:
I had no installation issues at all. Some of the screen dialogs could have been a lot clearer in terms of what you were expected to do. And as the video shows, there were one or two unexpected events.
But basically, you can be up and running with your 3 mobile broadband modem in less than ten minutes on a Windows Vista PC. I would imagine it would be a similar time installing on a Mac.
That’s what I call easy.
And what’s it like actually using the modem? I’ll be back in another post on another day with some thoughts on that.
{ 31 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Neville,
The dongle is new, we we’re able to send them out before they landed on the 3’s site.
However, they are now available at the 3 Store – http://tinyurl.com/3zvzfb
Cheers.
Got it Sam, thanks. It’s obviously so new that the specification that shows when you click ‘mobile detail’ is a photo of a different modem.
Is there a tech spec sheet anywhere?
The concept is brilliant, espeically for me as I go from tertiary institute to institute and am sick of logging onto their various systems. With Three I’ve got my own wireless system. Much easier. However, while it has worked immediately and consistently on one of my two Lenovos, it won’t work on the other. It does install, but won’t work. Both puters are Lenovo. The won’t that won’t take to it is the Lenovo 3000 V200.
Any clues would be much appreciated.
Regards
John Lanigan