Dave Burrows – Tech / iPhone Blog – Technical Evangelist

You may have read some previous posts where I used a HTC HD2 mobile phone with a WiFi Router application to turn the device into a MiFi (Mobile WiFi hotspot) so I could tether my iPhone WiFi to it when out and about. If you haven’t read these, they are available below.
- Getting 9 Mbps HSDPA speeds for my iPad whilst mobile
- Blogging from the beach on the iPad

I wanted to extend the coverage and battery on the HD2 (after all it is a mobile device and the battery drains more quickly) so I recently purchased the 3 UK – MiFi unit which is a small WiFi dongle that has it’s own battery source and SIM card slot that connects to the 3 UK mobile network (and unfortunately it is locked to 3). Here’s a review of the unit and how well it stacked up to my other MiFi connectivity on the O2 network.

The reason why I decided to buy the 3 MiFi Huawei E585 was to see if I could get a smaller device that had better battery power than the HD2 and likewise still get the same data rates, and also improve the power on time to being able to connect to the WiFi router when out as it can take a good 3+ minutes before I can connect.

The MiFi is incredibly small and a great device that easy fits in your pocket. The power on time to being able to connect to the 3G/HSDPA network over WiFi is 45 seconds which is better than that of the HD2 as it’s a full mobile phone and then I have to enable the WiFi Router application and that then takes another good 45 seconds, so the 3 MiFi from power on to connection is about 3x faster than the HD2 which is handy when on the move and you need WiFi access quickly.

When you place a non-3 SIM card in the MiFi and power it on you see the “Invalid SIM” message, so unfortunately 3 have now locked down the MiFi models to not use other network SIM’s, so if you want a MiFi then you have to unfortunately use a 3 UK SIM card.

When the device is powered on you’ll see from the second photo above that you get from left to right

- Signal bars
- 3G or H for HSDPA (this is the network connection type)
- WiFi (signifies that the WiFi has been enabled)
- World Symbol (this denotes that you have internet access)
- SMS message symbol (this denotes that you have received text messages)
- Battery power remaining (hopefully fairly self explanatory)

Underneath that you will see the amount of data downloaded in your current session along with the time the session has been open for. Unfortunately there’s no way of telling the total download for the current month directly on the device but you can through the 3 UK Dashboard which I’ll go into later.

I’m not sure why 3 UK decided to make the MiFi display like a mirror, it makes it really hard to read when out in bright sunlight or even indoors with the anti-reflective mirror coating they’ve put on the screen.

Battery Power
3 claim that the battery power is around 4.5 hours. The battery is a 1500mAh battery which is larger than most mobile phone batteries and most reviews claim to be getting in the region of 4-5 hours. I haven’t fully exhausted the battery yet but from tests so far it looks like I am falling within the lower part of that range.

What are the network speeds like?
3 UK claim that they have 95% coverage on 3G/HSDPA and their HSDPA speeds can go up to 7 Mbps. Here’s a comparison I carried out from the same location with the iPad connected to both the 3 UK Mi-Fi and also the HTC HD2 running an O2 UK SIM card.

3 UK Speeds on the Mi-Fi

O2 Speeds on the HD2 using it as a Mi-Fi device

So far you can see that the O2 network speeds seem to be a lot faster using HSDPA. Hopefully 3 will upgrade most of it’s network to higher HSDPA speeds sometime soon.

Performance wise you can see by the speeds above on 3 UK Mi-Fi that the speeds are quite erratic and sometimes I can get a lot faster speeds and sometimes I have had speeds down to as low as 300 Kbps, but the average is 1.8 Mbps which is acceptable for mobile use and hugely faster than GPRS speeds of 56 Kbps.

Get to manage your account and see your monthly usage
With 3 UK if you are using the MiFi you can simply go to http://3.home and this will open up your MiFi configuration page and tell you how much data you have used in the current session and total for the month.

3 UK also provide you with a web console for SMS Text Messages to the device (3 UK sometimes send you messages) and also give you the power to change the SSID, whether it’s broadcasting or not, and also your routers password amongst many other settings.

So far I love the design and size of the MiFi and will be using it a lot more. £15 for 5gb doesn’t seem a lot of bandwidth for your money when you can get similar iPad 3G data plans for the same £15 but you can get up to 15gb, but then again I think 5gb for my monthly usage will probably be hard to reach.

I’m going to be testing it in more hard to reach places like the beach, in hotel rooms, in restaurants typically where cell phone signal is at it’s lowest and will see how well it performs in these scenario’s.

Pros

• Small and compact device
• Battery power lasts 4-5 hours
• Easy to charge with a micro-USB charger connector
• Fast power on times – 45 seconds
• One Month rolling contract at £15 per month
• Contract can be cancelled at any time and restarted

Cons

• Locked to the 3 UK network
• Screen is ultra reflective
• Data speeds aren’t as good as other networks, e.g. 1.8 Mbps on 3 UK vs up to 9 Mbps on O2
• £15 for 5gb although not a bad deal, there are better iPad data plan deals available with double or triple the bandwidth for the same price