Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brian and have been from TechnoBuffalo with a review for you of the Novatel Wireless my 523 72 GSM personal hotspot now these MiFi devices aren't new they've been out on Sprint and Verizon for well over a year now but the GSM versions are kind of rare and hard to find and this particular unit will run you about 270 dollars but because you're using your existing data plan from your cell phone you're not being charged the 50 or $60 per month usage fee that you would have to pay on Sprint or Verizon so there's a really big cost savings there if you would find yourself using a device like this for internet wherever you are on your laptop or your netbook or your iPad so let's talk about how it works so my first take off the back battery cover just show you how I set it up I popped in my SIM card here put in the battery it's a very simple operation of course you have to take the SIM card out of your phone in order to use this and of course you should have an unlimited data plan if you're going to use this device I also put in a micro SD card because this is a very unique feature of this MiFi I can actually access files from a micro SD card and have up to five people that are using the Wi-Fi connection off of this also access those same files so a great way if you're if you're trying to share documents or you're working on a project for school or for work really cool so let's talk about how this works it operates so easily I can't even believe that you turn it on and you wait about 15 seconds and the lights going to cycle through and when it turns blue we're on 3G when it turns purple we are on HSPA so there's blue and we'll see a Wi-Fi light turn on when it's ready and there's a Wi-Fi light and if we wait another couple of seconds we will get it to turn purple which means we're on a tMT's faster 3G connection there goes purple and and we're good we're good that's it so we are ready to connect on the laptop here so I'm going to go down here I'm on Windows 7 I'm going to click on my Phi so it's listed here in the in the network list and I'm gonna hit connect and of course you can have wireless encryption but I figure that why you know waste time spend typing in a password when it's not likely someone's going to latch on to this network unless you're at a Starbucks or somewhere public like that so I can see in the bottom right corner it's connecting I have an exclamation point so I'm going to wait another five seconds and I will head on over to the browser to give you a speed test and some other demonstrations okay we are connected over the MiFi the light has turned a solid purple to mean that the device is connected so I can jump on into Google and usually the first time you load a webpage it's a little bit slow but after that after that connection is made it's fast so let's go to any gadget or any gadget mobile and again where you are running off of this modify and look how fast it is it's quite impressive now this device has a range of about 30 feet and like I mentioned you can connect up to five Wi-Fi devices this is perfect if you're in the car if you ever in a long trip and you want to get Wi-Fi you want to get internet access just pull out this guy and and you got it so let's click on some links just to see how it looks then we'll run a speed test at speedtest.net so it almost feels as if I'm sitting home on my broadband connection from the cable company because it's just everything's very very snappy and let's see how video plays back although I'm not sure if this is HD video okay let's see if we can make it HD no we can't so let's real quick jump to John four Lakers channel and I'll bump that up to 720p and let's see how please there goes 720p video it's not stopping to buffer not bad at all let's go to speedtest.net to see how fast the actual speed is coming through we run two tests just to get an average it's a very good site to test your bandwidth so that's latency is gonna be a little bit slow but you can expect that from cellular internet but the speeds let's see alright looks like it wants to get to to make up just hit 2 megabits per second this is actually quite impressive 2.6 megabits per second down pretty darn good speeds to get over the the cell phone company let's do it one more time just to to get an average here so we're to test again so again we got 2.6 down I'm mostly interested in the download speed because I'm not going to be uploading YouTube videos over am i fine connection let's see what we get the second time around see if we can beat 2.6 now looks like two point three eight okay now I want to show you the file sharing capability and I'm going to do that on the iPad so let me switch gears here be right back okay so here we are on the iPad and I'm going to show you the web interface which allows you to access those files I'm going to go into settings and show you that we are already connected to the MiFi hotspot there it's checked off and real quick let's just see the speed that we're getting through the iPad I'm sure it's going to be very similar than we that we got on the laptop so begin test and let's see what we what we pull off maybe a little bit slower so we're gonna do about one point one point nine I saw come up 1.9 megabits per second down and on the iPad we're at about looks like we peaked at about 960 kilobits per second so still not very bad so let me show you the web interface and you can do this from any device that's connected to the to the MiFi whether it's a laptop or netbook or whatever else so the web address is wwm IFI and without the dot-com and it's going to take you into a screen that shows you some statistics about the MiFi you can see I'm over AT&T HSUPA you can see the connection can't even see how much battery I have left I found that I can get the full four hours that's advertised I'm sure over time that will go down but you can also connect it to your computer via USB so you can charge it and use the action at the same time which is quite beneficial so here's some other information you can see how much data you've received how much you've sent so that if you don't have an unlimited data plan you can keep an eye on that now let's go over here to micro SD files I placed a few pictures on the my Fi and here we have the folder structure and of course on the iPad you're not going to play avi videos which is a Windows file format on a laptop running Windows you could but standard files like pictures you can so here are a bunch of wallpapers let's try this one and so here they are here are the pictures from from the MiFi and if it's a known file format it'll show up in the browser of course that limits a lot on the iPad but if you're on you know if you're connected with your Mac or your Windows computer it really lets you show a variety of file formats very handy function if you're sharing with people or you just need a wireless way to access a micro SD card maybe you're taking pictures off of your smartphone or just transferring files and over here it shows you how much space you have free so overall I recommend the MiFi personal hotspot again I'll put a link in the sidebar on how to get this from Negri electronics comm it's about two hundred seventy dollars if this is a product that you would use a lot I think this is a much better alternative than getting the my five from Verizon or Sprint when there is a monthly charge you're already paying for a data plan why not turn the data plan into a MiFi using this device where it turns on very fast you've got instant connection for five computers that's it for now