Review

You might think that having use of a USB broadband modem free of charge is the equivalent of a license to print money.

After all, why worry about the costs of going online via the cellular network when you don’t have to pay the bill?

Well, I’m sure the folk at mobile operator 3 and 3mobilebuzz will be pleased to know that my use of 3’s Huawei E169G USB broadband modem has been quite minimal since I got it to use and experiment with in early April.

That’s not to say that I don’t think about costs. I do, every time I go online with it which is typically when I’m mobile with my laptop.

Even if there’s wifi around, I tend to use the modem (remember, I am testing it out).

I think about costs - and I have absolutely no sure way of knowing how much a given online session will have cost.

I can get an idea of how much time I’ve been online at any given moment, and how much data has flowed back and forth.

That kind of information is tracked and displayed in the modem manager application you see pictured here that you run in order to use the modem and get online with it.

Quite useful information, in fact, even if a little mental arithmetic is required to make some sense of it all.

In this example, I can see that I was online in my most recent session for a bit over 15 minutes.

I can also see that the total time I’ve been online since installing this modem on this particular laptop is a little over 5 hours and 41 minutes.

And I can see that total data sent comes to 11,046.94Kb while data received is 43,246.45Kb, making a total amount of data traffic as 54,293.39Kb.

A bit convoluted, it seems to me. When I’m looking at data allowances as gigabytes, I want to understand that more easily as a proportion of my data allowance depending on the plan I’m on.

The total looks like 543Mb, to round it up. Is that right?

And is that how I should be seeing it? As a total?

This is all great but what should also be somewhere on a screen in the application is how much all this is costing.

I’d like to see this application show me what tariff I’m on, whether it’s a contract or pay-as-you-go, and how much I’m paying (well, I’m not, but if I were a normal customer I would be).

It should also show me how much I’ve got left of my data allowance for the month, before surcharges kick in (and it should tell me how much those surcharges are).

A little multi-coloured bar graph would do the trick.

Maybe I could see all this stuff if I went online to 3’s website somewhere. But I want to see this kind of account information before I go online.

Even if the information comes with loads of disclaimers, that’s fine. I want some clue of where I stand with my account each time I load up the software.

When I connect, the software should check my account online and update the local account information before I disconnect.

And it should keep that data on the USB stick or on the inserted SIM card, not on the computer, so that I always have the account information to hand if I connect with another computer.

Security and data protection issues to consider, too, but how difficult can this all be to implement? Surely not that difficult?

I don’t think any other mobile operator provides such information, but correct me if I’m wrong. And if I am wrong, 3, please catch up.

To my mind, being transparent with pricing includes this kind of added value service. Good for relationships and loyalty, especially if no one else is doing it.

And on pricing generally, I see that from tomorrow May 1, 3 has dropped the price for its pay-as-you-go offering by 50 percent, from just under £100 to just under £50.

That’s really great, but I’d still want to see my account information before I connect.

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.

What a palaver with this Xda Orbit 2 car kit!

After some Twitter exchanges today, fellow blogger-tester Sarah Blow posted a video in response to mine at the weekend re the difficulties I’m having in getting the phone cradle to fit with the pole thingy.

A brilliant video, Sarah, showing how easy it should be!

Yet no matter what I do, I cannot get this thing together. Here’s another walk-though (embedded below) of the non-result I keep having. Plus a view on what it’s like fitting it in the car.

The phone itself is great; some comments on that here soon. Yet my experience with this accessory kit, something that should be so simple, is not good at all.

Either the accessory is just badly made or I’m just too dumb to figure it out, I’m really not sure which.

Helpful suggestions more than welcome.

Last Monday, I received an Xda Orbit 2 mobile phone courtesy of mobile operator O2 and their ad agency VCCP.

So I’ve been playing with this gadget all week, trying it out mostly with wifi. It’s very nice indeed.

As a phone, it does what all phones do (let you make and receive calls) and it does that job pretty well in the few calls I’ve made, probably testament to O2’s good cellular network coverage.

Not received any calls yet as I haven’t widely advertised the number

As I mentioned in my initial post on my main blog, I’ll be posting thoughts about the Xda Orbit 2 here as and when I have some.

Today I do and it’s to do with an accessory for the phone that I found pretty useless, never mind extremely irritating.

Yesterday I drove into London and decided to try out CoPilot Live 7, the satellite navigation application that comes with the phone.

It’s good and I’ll have a post soon with thoughts on that. This post, though, is to do with the fixing kit you put in your car where you put the phone in a cradle so you can see it and interact with it from your driving position.

Assembling this car kit is impossible. Two of the parts just will not mate. I must have had a dozen attempts to try and do it, all to no avail.

This is one of those situations where you wonder if you’re just an idiot in not being able to figure it out or if the product is badly designed and/or made.

I think the product is badly designed as surely it should be simpler than this.

What exactly is this about? Take a look at this little video I made and posted to YouTube.

If I’m not doing it right, please let me know!