April 2008

Anthony at Fresh Plastic has noticed that the bizarrely-Jackie-Chan-endorsed Woolworths has a great offer for anyone who hasn’t yet picked up a 3 Skypephone. They’re practically chucking them in the faces of consumers at £39.99 to buy on Pay As You Go.

As Anthony astutely points out, this includes £10 of pre-paid credit (according to a post he found over at MoneySavingExpert forum) which actually means the phone itself costs a penny under £30. All this adds up to Anthony’s belief that this could indeed be the best £30 handset in the world, and who are we to disagree?

He’s also included a handy bullet-pointed recap of just what you’ll get for your £39.99, so what more could you ask for?

Over at Overclockers UK forum, easyrider is considering getting in on some dongle action for use on his in-car laptop but, before he decides to take the plunge, is seeking the answer to two short and sweet questions: “will it work on the move?” and “what’s the cheapest?”.

Well, Azraeluk and squawkBOX offer their opinions, with both suggesting 3’s web-giving wonder-stick as the dongle of choice for his needs. In fact, squawkBOX helpfully writes, “3 offer their broadband service on a PAYG basis which might be better for car use. All you need to do is buy a dongle here: http://threestore.three.co.uk/payg/?modem=1 (which is powered through USB) Then you pay £10 for 1GB, £15 for 3GB or £25 for 7GB of access (this lasts 30 days).”

Easyrider seems to be tempted; although the he’s concerned that the PAYG dongles themselves are a little pricey, he thinks £10 for 30 days of use is a fair deal. Head on over to read the full thread and offer any relevant experience you may have.

From tomorrow, that’s May 1st for those of a numerical persuasion, the PAYG green and black ZTE dongle and the Huawei E220 dongles will drop their price points from the original £99.99 to £49.99.

That means a saving on PAYG mobile broadband dongles of £50 for anyone taking up the service from tomorrow onward. Should you be interested the crucial figures stack up thusly: the data allowance packages come in at £10, £15 and £25 for 1GB, 3GB and 7GB respectively, each lasting for 30 days.

We have it on good authority that the most popular package is the 3GB, which allows a breakdown of usage something along the lines of 2000 plain text emails, a 100 hours surfing the web, while also squeezing in downloads of around 200 minutes of video and 200 music tracks.

Obviously, this saving of £50 will all be going crazy live on the 3 Store website tomorrow, where you’ll be able to get all the details you need. For now however, consider this a heads up from your friendly neighbourhood 3mobilebuzz ;)

Ewan of SMS Text News has been videoing his 3 dongle in action and has posted with his thoughts: “3 UK Mobile USB broadband modem - its brilliant”. He is most impressed with the speed the dongle gets to, feeling it is evidently comparable to wifi. Ewan also throws in a link to this story on mobile broadband speeds he posted earlier, keeping everything relevant and giving a bigger picture perspective.

Anyway, the video is below of Ewan’s in the field test of the service and it’s usability, accompanied by his enthusiastic commentary.

Ok, they’ve been around for a while in one form or another, but that is no reason not to be excited - they’re video glasses for crying-out loud!

Fresh Plastic has gone all square-eyed on us and thrown up the news and a link to the Vuzix A920 product page at the 3 store. These eye bandits give the impression of watching a 62-inch screen from 9 feet away and function with any video device that outputs standard analog video, NTSC or PAL, so that’ll potentially include your supa-dupa smart phone then! Excellent!

A word of advice though, avoid looking like the chap below at all cost.

A thread titled Hands up who is a Geek!! at ukbusinessforums has given a mention to the 3 mobile broadband dongle.

Seemingly a call to action aimed at the nerd world, or a thinly veiled blog promotion by the thread originator (you decide), it has courted a response from Carl-CSNM on the subject of mobile broadband. His response is a glowing recommendation for the 3 service, stating he has not yet been let down by the little plug and play fellow. And although he honourably doesn’t mention who his home broadband provider is, he caps his post as such, “I get higher speeds via [the 3 dongle] than I do my fixed broadband line.”

Should you want to read Carl-CSNM’s post straight from the horses mouth, or discuss whether ‘geek’ can be a term of endearment, then you could do a lot worse than visit this thread. What I’d like to see answered is how one distinguishes between ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’, or if in fact there is a difference? I’ve never been sure.

After having had about all she can put up with from using her handset as a bluetooth modem - unreliable, fiddly and expensive (her words not mine), Sarah - The Bringer of Tea has dunked into the mobile broadband market with a 3 dongle.

Opting for a data limit of 1GB a month at £10 monthly for a year and half, Sarah talks about how quick the in-store sign-up and transaction was and, on returning home, this was pleasantly replicated by the installation process. Since then, the service has been “snappy”, admittedly not as fast as the home connection, but not far off. And this is causing her to ponder; with 7GB data limits available (about the same amount of data Sarah goes through on her home account) at a cheaper rate, how long before mobile broadband will start putting the squeeze on ASDL and Cable providers? She may well have a point.

Nerds love toys, and a bunch of proudly out-of-the-geek-closet tech heads at the UK Business Forums have been discussing the joys of a good USB modem. Carl in particular has been ‘very impressed’ with the easy installation and performance of his 3 dongle: ‘I get higher speeds via it than I do my fixed broadband line’, so join them if you want to wallow in a spot of dongle lovin’.

However, over in the Tropical Fish Forums, Paul explains that his distinctly un-geeky sister has ‘just bought a 3 mobile broadband internet dongle the same as mine’ but has been left high and dry; her Windows 98 OS ‘does not recognise the drivers that are in-built in the dongle’. As other members are quick to point out, she needs to upgrade to XP. Frankly, the drivers on her quaint old OS just can’t handle the might of a big beefy dongle, and she’s missing out on a treat.

VoIP Watch blogging bigwig Andy Abramson has posted a nice little love note to his 3 Sykephone. After speculating about why iSkoot will not be acting as mobile client for 30 new Skypephone handsets, Andy is momentarily overwhelmed with the glory of our favourite travel-friendly phone and 3’s tarrifs: ‘The H3G SkypePhone is one of the most amazing platforms around. And, personally I can’t beat the cost savings for calling back to the USA when I’m in the UK.’

Read more about just why he digs the device here.

Neil of Neil’s World has been using his dongle in his lunch hour hang-out, and although he gets a good HSDPA signal ‘equivalent to lower-end DSL or cable-based broadband packages’, he’s found that web pages can be slow to download. Neil has realised that ’stealth’ downloads could be the culprit, as a whole host of sites eat into his bytes as soon as he connects - from Firefox updating and Plaxo synchronising to iScrobbler, um, scrobbling - and so recommends getting a mobile broadband modem with at least 1GB data transfer to help handle the sneaky scheduled tasks. He also reminds dongle users to keep an eye on their battery, as finds it drains an extra half-hour or so; read the full post here.

Over at One Man and His Blog, Adam has found that his dongle connects reliably both on the train and in Cafe Nero. However, as a ‘pic-heavy blogger’ he has noticed that uploading photos can take a frustrating amount of time.

As a download diva who throws a tantrum worthy of Van Halen faced with a brown M&M if forced to wait more than a couple of seconds for my computer to obey, I’m definitely going to freeze stealth downloads on my laptop when I’m on the move to keep things speedy. Anyone else got some top time-saving tips?

Anyone who’s been following Alasdair Allan’s posts on The Daily ACK will know that he’s had some sharp teething problems with his new 3 HDSPA USB modem. It all started when he unboxed the dongle and found his Macbook wouldn’t play with his new toy; he then updated us a week later, when he’d successfully used the dongle with Leopard on his iMac, but still had no joy with Tiger OS X.

But just to get the weekend off on a good note, Alasdair has posted the news (on the move, using the dongle itself) that he’s cracked the problem. He arrived at the solution by combining advice from a helpful geek in 3’s technical support team with the Mac configuration advice from Aaron Heath that we posted about earlier today. Basically it boils down to the fact that ‘the proprietary connection software didn’t actually have the permissions it needed to add or configure the new network interfaces’ - read the full story here if you too want to use mobile broadband with Tiger.

And there’s a nice extra tip in the article for anyone wanting to keep track of their data usage in the form of SurplusMeter, a free app which can monitor ongoing usage against a preset bandwidth allowance.

What do you do if you’re having issues with your dongle? Well, if you’re an upstanding blogger like Mister Aaron Heath over at Rational Geekery, you don’t sit about moaning; you get on and post a handy troubleshooting how-to for fellow Mac users who may be having trouble connecting the device.

Having tried everything to get his iBook to accept the dongle (including the time-honoured banging-the-desk method), Aaron finally deduced that the key to success was ensuring that his Mac’s settings were correct, and using OSX’s on-board internet connection facility rather than the modem’s own pre-installed software.

He emphasises that most Mac users should find that the modem will work straight out of the box using its own software, but the few that have encountered problems can follow his screenshot guide to configuring their Jobs-machines differently. And if you’re still not sorted, Aaron invites you to drop him a comment and he’ll try to answer your specific queries.

Now that’s what we call gentlemanly behaviour.

Ewan MacLeod from SMS Text News has just received his ’smaller, sexier’ new E169 dongle as a replacement for the older E172 model he’s been using for the past year with great success, and he’s looking forward to testing it out.

It’s worth checking out his unboxing video (here and below); not just for the comparison between the sizes and designs of the dongles, but for Ewan’s commentary in his soothing Scottish burr, his pronunciation of ‘Huawei’, and his particular excitement at the prospect of popping the new SIM card out of its plastic backing. Brilliant.

We’ve all had one: the flatmate that hogs the phone talking to their girlfriend in Wales, spends hours trawling through online porn in their room, yet bickers about every last penny of your landline/broadband bill.

Well, Lolly of Blog Til You Drop thinks that 3’s dongle could be the perfect solution for anyone who shares a pad but is reluctant to tie themselves down to a 12 month phone contract which may well outlast the friendship. Having found installation very simple, Lolly has had plenty of use out of her mobile modem as she travels across the UK for work. She finds the signal strength pretty reliable, and is impressed with 3’s tariffs -although she does think that the dongles have been released in a few too many formats too soon.

In her entertaining post, Lolly also speculates that 3’s dongles will also really appeal to itinerant London-based Aussies, whose Skypephone contracts would secure them a discount - especially if they came in a few more colours. Pink dongles? I’m not going to rise to the bait.

Some people do all the work so we don’t have to. Having received his 3G USB modem, Dale Lane was determined to use it on his EeePC. But the baby computer operates with Linux, and the dongle is only compatible with Mac and Windows OS - meaning that it simply won’t recognise the dongle as a hardware device when you plug it in.

Undeterred by forum naysayers, Dale looked at the dongle on his Windows ThinkPad and discovered that the Huawei E169 is a ‘composite device’ - both a flash memory disk and a modem - which the EeePC can’t handle. But having sniffed out Josua Dietze’s existing Linux USB_modeswitch utility, Dale inputted the codes for the Huawei E169 device, allowing him to disable the memory storage mode and enable the modem.

In short, The Man Did It (respect) and it’s all working like a dream. Apparently, E220 or newer dongles don’t have this problem; but if you’ve got an E169, read his clearly explained guide with full screenshots to get mobile broadband on your EeePC, easy.