Gadgetory

hey guys it's brandon minimun from TechnoBuffalo and this is a review of spritz 4g network using their new 3g 4g card now they're WiMAX 4G network is only available in select markets I am near Philadelphia and the Wi-Fi signal comes out of out of the city and into most of the surrounding suburbs which is where I'm filming this from right now although I've tested this directly in the city and in many adjacent counties and we'll talk about the speed soon right now it's also in Texas in Washington and some other cities around the country obviously sprint plans to deploy their 4g network on a bigger scale in 2010 the wimax technology goes right up against LTE in terms of the 4g standards that we're going to start seeing in the future so let's go through actually connecting to the 4g network going to start by just plugging in the wireless card pretty simple stuff to start and use any USB port and now i'm going to open the sprint 4G application they call it smart view this is actually the same application that they use for the 3g cards and it says initializing and it'll take a few seconds to get going all right and so we're connected to Sprint's 4G network that took about 45 seconds probably closer to 55 seconds which isn't the fastest but connecting to these 3g networks with wireless cards often take that long another way that you can tell that we are on wimax and it's not happening right now but usually you'll get a blue blinking light on the 3g 4g card but it turns green when you're in an area where there is only 3g so right now we have two bars so let's do a speed test and see how fast we are running right now so i'm going to go into chrome and let's go to speedtest.net all right and click begin test see what happens so I should mention that the theoretical maximum speed of wimax according to sprint is about 10 megabits per second down with the average being around and just for comparison a 3g card will get you about 1.2 to 1.3 down on average so they're really claiming to have four to five times the speed that 3g does of course there are wide variations for example right now you see that I've got 3.39 megabits per second noun which is pretty darn fast but definitely not even close to the six I've tested this in Philadelphia and in many other places around the region and I've gotten between two and four point two megabits per second down I haven't gotten to a place where I had a full signal that's probably why I've never achieved this six megabits per second down that said 3.39 even in this case is still quite fast if I were to turn off the 3g 4g card use y Wi-Fi network right here in my house I would get about 10 megabits per second down of course that varies by your internet service provider but this is a reasonable speed and using this out in the field out in the middle of the city is a great experience that it feels like I'm on a fast Wi-Fi network but as you can tell you're not going to want to upload YouTube videos from a 4G card because the the upload speeds are still not that fast this is actually extremely slow it should have been about point 5 in fact if we do another test I think it should be higher okay so a little better this time point 3 up but still nothing great in terms of the reliability of the connection it's quite fantastic I've used this for well over an hour straight and there was no downtime it didn't disconnect it stayed connected the whole time the only thing I noticed is that that the card got extremely more to the point where i was a little bit concerned that it may be too warm inside and you actually hear some stories of some 3g or 4g card sort of melting inside fortunately the 3g 4g card does have a warranty with it speaking of which the price for the 3g 4g card is free after ravings and you have to pay seventy dollars per month to use this although if you're using the 4g access its unlimited which is really fantastic if you're on the 3g network you can only use five gigabytes of data which is actually plenty because that will allow you to download a ton of emails and look at lots of pictures you're just not going to want to stream a lot of HD video if you're on the 3g network and just so you can get another indication of how fast this is let me go to a few different websites let's go to John for lakers YouTube channels try to stream aid an HD video and see how that works let's scroll down a little bit click on the HD button on this video and I'm going to go right to play I'm not going to let it buffer although it may need to so let's go fullscreen and see hd-video / Sprint's 4G network let's see looks like it already stopped to buffer so I'm going to give it actually I think it paused yep it did pause here it goes so it actually didn't need to buffer you I'm going to fast forward a little bit to see a little bit of motion so we can see how smooth things are jump ahead a lot so it's definitely going at the buffer now for a moment very smooth I jump to a certain spot and it's playing back quite smoothly so HD video comes across nicely on sprint's 4g network let's go to say any edge calm and see how quickly that comes on the screen and there goes style is about four or five seconds and we have pretty much the whole page loaded here and ready to go click on a link and sort of see how fast it jumps to the next page very fast from that transition will go to engadget mobile to see how fast that page loads very smooth i feel like i'm on Wi-Fi right now so so quite fast indeed especially for basic web browsing jumping around from site to site all in all if you're going to be getting a 3g card or a 4G card it makes a lot of sense to check to see if sprint has the 4g signal in your city again we'll post on TechnoBuffalo so you can see if that's there because the price difference to get the 4g is only ten dollars a month if you compare this to the 3g cards from verizon and from AT&T and t-mobile one more thing of note sprint also sent us a wide pipe for review and the idea what this is that you plug in the sprint 3g 4g card and then you get an instant wireless hotspot that has 4g allowing for people to connect at one time it's kind of like a mifi but it does 4g the battery lasts between two and four hours and the performance is quite good even when two or three of your friends are connected the idea behind this is of course you can go into a car and you can have your friends all surfing the web using a 4G connection at the same time and it works quite well this is about one hundred and seventy dollars so it may not be necessary for most people but it's nice to have if you collaborate and you don't find yourself near a Wi-Fi signal on a regular basis so overall the sprint 4G 3G card is a pretty neat device we're really looking forward to better coverage in more cities and again Sprint's 4G network is in its infancy so there's not that much coverage and out here in the suburbs away from the city the signal is kind of weak so it's not it's not perfect yet but we're looking forward to them deploying it on a bigger basis overall i recommend the sprint 4g 3g card that's it for now