A review of the Huawei E160G 3G modem on 3

Work has been exceptionally dictatorial about its internet usage of late, and with the pre-existing ban on the use of Facebook and eBay at work newly supplemented with a log of all the websites one visits, it was enough to tip me over into getting my own mobile broadband access. As you may know from my previous post, I have an MSI Wind which I have been using as my primary on-the-go computing device for a while now. Ironically, however, while it is a netbook, when I take it out of the house I rarely used it to surf the net, mainly because it is quite difficult nowadays to find an open WiFi access point. My new 3G modem has definitely changed all that.

I did a quick search on the net and knew that I could get a fairly good deal from 3. At their web shop they are offering 3GB downloads for £15 a month. With a bit of digging though, I signed up for a contract giving me 5GB of downloads a month for £7.50. It is over 18 months though, so I hope it works out! The bonus of a £10 accessories voucher was also appreciated!

I received my dongle on Wednesday. It is a Huawei E160G in black, and rather sleek it is too. I used to carry a USB thumbdrive on my keychain, and this resembles it closely, although it is thicker, longer and wider. I did try to attach it to my keychain but as it kept stabbing me whenever I sat down, I abandoned that idea pretty quickly. The other main complaint is that if it is shaped like something you could put on a keychain, why does it not have a keychain loop? Instead it has one of those tiny little holes which it is even difficult to fit a regular mobile phone lanyard through. Rather bad design on Huawei's part I must say.

Apart from the size and the lack of a decent method of attachment, the modem itself is quite attractive. It has a rubberized outer coating with a 3 logo printed in white at one end. Just behind the logo and underneath a thinner piece of plastic is the status LED which glows through the enclosure. Pretty cool. The dongle itself is three-quarters encircled by a chrome edge in which there are two flaps: one is for an external antenna, while the other accepts a microSD card. I was quite surprised at this as I already carry an 8GB thumbdrive and the fact that this can take on that role is a bit of a bonus. Indeed I put my 8GB microSDHC into the slot and it is definitely SDHC compatible.

At the top, under the cap is the USB port and a small tray for the SIM card. The dongle is pretty chunky, and it comes supplied with a USB extension cord so that, if your USB ports are closely spaced, you don't end up blocking two of them. On my MSI Wind I end up plugging the dongle straight into the port on the right, with the left ports being used for my RF portable mouse and the USB thumbdrive. It works out quite well.

Another interesting feature of the dongle is that when you insert it into a PC it mounts as a CD ROM drive and proceeds to install the software. The process is fairly straightforward as it is done through a wizard, but it was slightly annoying that the moment it was loaded, the program told me that an update was available, and it went on line, to get it. This prompted a total uninstall of the original software and a reinstall. Honestly, you'd think it would be trivial to update the modem with the latest software. The microSD reader component mounts as a separate USB drive.

Once everything is up and running, which does take a while, you are confronted with a big orange button you click on to connect. At home I found that I had a 6/10 bar HSDPA connection with a theoretical maximum of 3.6MBps download speed. The modem itself does not support the higher speed HSPA network. In reality, however, and I know that this is contingent on place and time, I was getting measly download speed of only 160kbps, and uploads of 52kbps! Obviously this is sorely disappointing, because it does preclude some of the things you take for granted on the internet like streaming video. That means no YouTube and no iPlayer. I've not read the fine print about whether or not this is permissible anyway under the terms and conditions, but it is clearly not physically possible. Instant messaging is fine and VoIP struggles but does work. No video conferencing though.

So, how do I feel so far? Well, I love the freedom that a wireless modem affords, and I like that 5GB really is more than I need so I don't really have to think about it. It has certainly changed my mobile computing patterns, and I find I am answering more emails, and updating my Facebook profile with greater frequency. My only wish is that I bought a netbook with a modem built into it. While not terribly inconvenient, the dongle does take up one precious USB port and it sticks out a mile! And I live in fear that it will get nicked if I leave it plugged in when I am away from the desk. Overall I am happy with it. Let's see how it develops.

A quick review of the MSI Wind

The demands I place on my portable devices aren't great. I generally use them for the odd bit of word processing or spreadsheet data entry, and if I am particularly adventurous, might also read emails or surf a bit of the web. That is why until now I have been quite content with my combination of an old handheld PC and an old XP notebook. Then the MSI Wind came along, and it met my needs for a lightweight, relatively powerful and suitably cheap computer, and I rushed out (or actually, logged on) and bought it.

As a portable device the Wind in its Advent 4211 incarnation is a small and light notebook. It feels about the same weight as my MobilePro 900C, and much lighter than my Fujitsu Lifebook P2120. As it happens, the Wind is significantly thinner than the Lifebook (it lacks an optical drive after all) but still deeper than the MobilePro, so the latter still wins on size. However, I never really understood the point of laptops smaller than this because, to me at least, the reduction in usability is not made up for by the gain in portability. After all, unless the computer is the size of a mobile phone you still have to carry a bag to put it into.

The most major advantage of the MobilePro is that it boots instantaneously; it is, after all, running an embedded operating system. In contrast, the Lifebook with its 800MHz Transmeta Crusoe processor used to take nearly five or six minutes to boot up into XP! So my usage patterns of the two devices varied. When I am out and about, but with access to a regular desktop I'd carry the H/PC, but when I was travelling it was the notebook which would go with me.

To be honest, I hardly ever do a cold reboot on my XP systems anyway, preferring to hibernate over shutting down. The Lifebook could just about do it, but a wake up would still take a couple of minutes, so it was still frustrating and nowhere near as convenient as the H/PC. Thankfully, the Wind is running Intel's new Atom processor and has a healthy 1GB of RAM. That means that it does boot up quickly, and it takes a very tolerable 15 seconds to go from hibernate to a useable desktop. The processor and RAM combination means that once you are booted up, there is just so much more you can do.

I like to configure my desktops (one I use for sound/ video editing and website management, and one which I use as an HTPC) with Rocket Dock, Yahoo! Widgets and a Vista-esque skin with transparency, animation and drop shadows. Until now I could never ever dream of doing that with the Lifebook without it being crushed. In contrast, the Wind desktop looks and behaves exactly like my desktop. In itself, this is just eye candy, but it reflects how well the system is able to cope with multitasking and processor intensive activities. Until now, for instance, I would never have been able to reencode a video using Super which simultaneously watching a show on BBC iPlayer on my laptop, but this is handled with aplomb on the Wind.


The main purpose of the MSI Wind is as an internet connected device, and this it handles very well. For one thing, the all-important wireless connections of Bluetooth and WiFi are built-in which means none of the nasty PCMCIA cards/ USB dongles of my former two devices . I’m using Firefox 3, and it handles the Silverlight-based ITV catch up website with no problems at all. Flash videos play as well on the netbook as well as on my HTPC. Better yet, the built-in webcam means that I can Skype/Windows Live Messenger my parents and friends on the other side of the globe wherever I am. This is not, I hasten to add, always a good thing. None of these are things which I could ever do on my MobilePro, and only with great difficulty on my Lifebook. It does not have any GSM/3G technology built-in, but internet connection sharing using my phone is not a problem. This means access to the web is feasible even when I am away from WiFi.

I realize that I am making the MSI Wind sound totally wonderful, and there is no doubt that it has almost supplanted the MobilePro 900c and the Lifebook P2120 as my portable device of choice, but it is not all a bed of roses. My first and most major complaint is the battery life. Now I admit that all those wireless radios do suck up the juice, but I would expect more than 2 hours on a screen at half brightness with wireless off. With wireless on I am barely eking out 90 minutes of uptime. On my Lifebook I was probably doing no better, and in fact the productive time was probably less as I waited for the processor to grind through things, but with the 900c I was easily getting four hours and more on a full charge.

Secondly, unlike the Lifebook, there are no hardware quick launch buttons. I have taken for granted the ability to launch Firefox with a single button press, and while launching a program from the dock is not a huge hassle, it is less convenient.

Thirdly, the MSI Wind has a track pad. I am well aware that users fall into two different groups as far as track pads and pointer nipples go, but I am very much a fan of the nipple (oh ho ho!) as it is implemented on the Lifebook. The Lifebook also has the all important third mouse button which enables opening of links in new tab in the web browser. I’ve still not figured how to do this in a convenient way on the Wind. The 900c is even better in that it has a touch screen and, apart from price, it baffles me as to why this was not incorporated into the Wind.

Fourthly, the built-in speakers are very feeble. I can understand that they decided not to put it under the palm rests. This is an annoyance for me on the Lifebook in that you are always covering the speakers with your hands while typing. But the fact that they are on top means that the sound passes through unobstructed and the Lifebook actually doubles up as a pretty good DVD player. There is no optical drive in the MSI Wind, but to be honest, I rarely used it in the Lifebook, and if I really need it I can use a virtual one with Virtual Daemon Manager, or if pushed, use an actual USB external drive.

Many reviews I have read on-line go on about how wonderful and spacious the keyboard is on the Wind; it certainly is when compared with the EeePC, its closest competitor, but is about the same size as the keyboard on the Lifebook and the 900c. But size really isn’t everything, and the keyboard on the wind has a very solid feel to it, with very good key travel. I can type without problems on it, and it beats the fragile feel of the Lifebook keyboard hands down. With the Lifebook it feels like you could mistype, jab your fingers under a key and pop it off all too easily.

So, all in all, I think I am really enjoying my new gadget. It has finally supplanted my duo of a Handheld PC and a subnotebook, in a convenient, attractive and inexpensive package. I’m very pleased with it!

Stand-alone mp3 player and internet radio

I was busy tapping away in Open Office Writer when my partner came into the room and asked me to play a "Autumn Leaves". I was, of course, recording a TV show at the same time, so even though the combination of these programs didn't totally kill my PC (AMD XP processor, yes, it is old), poor Eva Cassidy had a serious case of the stutters.

Of course, the answer is to upgrade the processor, but that, being totally against my philosophy of exhausting antiquated equipment, is out of the question. The alternative is to get a standalone mp3 player. One which certainly looks good is the Logik IR100 internet radio. Not only can it access internet radio stations, it can play mp3 files stored in network folders.

But naturally, my desktop will slow to a crawl if it has to feed an mp3 over a network to another device, which means some form of local storage is necessary. I just checked my music folder and I have over 30GB of music, so that puts most last generation digital audio players out of the equation.

Ideally, I'd like to put all my music on a portable hard drive and plug it into something which has a USB host. It should also have WiFi connectivity for internet radio streaming. At present, after some research, I have decided to with a PDA that has USB-host and WiFi, like the Toshiba e800, or something like a Fujitsu Stylistic LT which can also do both.

Watch this space!

It ain't easy being green

Although it is just about to get easier.

I am all for avoiding waste by maximizing the lifespan of your tech gear, especially through repair and reuse, so it is timely that a report (caution: PDF link!) from the trial of open source software in government has concluded that:

A typical hardware refresh period for Microsoft Windows is 3-4 years. A major UK manufacturing organisation quotes its hardware refresh period for Linux systems as 6-8 years.

A world in which people upgrade their computers once every 8 years? Now that would be amazing and great for the landfills of the world.

What would really be great is if the hardware itself was ecofriendly and recyclable. There are loads of personal casemods using biodegradeable components, and there are a number of companies looking at different materials. Asus have recently created a laptop shell made from bamboo which actually looks beautiful. Being environmentally friendly is a definite consideration for future tech purchases.

A show on the side

One of the more exciting new technologies to come from the Windows Vista stable is Sideshow. Its purported function is to run small programs (or 'gadgets' as Microsoft likes to call them), allowing users to access a range of PC functionality either remotely or without the computer even being on.

The first device to come out with this functionality is the Asus W5fe laptop. In this particular incarnation, the Sideshow facility is embedded in the lid of the laptop, and allows you to access your personal information without having to spin it up. Sounds like a good idea, although if the laptop is off, your data is only cached, not automatically synchronised with the server.

So far so not very exciting. In this day and age where every mobile phone syncs with Outlook, it is hard to imagine a situation where you would need to look up an address on the lid of your laptop rather than your phone.

But even if you don't have a phone that can do that, you can still replicate some of that functionality with a much older bit of technology - the Xircom REX 6000. This clever bit of kit, which can be had on eBay for around a tenner, is a touchscreen PDA small enough to sit in your laptop's cardbus slot. The real magic is that it syncs via the PCMCIA connection. So, even when your, say Asus W5f (sans 'e') is off, you can whip out your REX and look up that appointment or contact detail.

Tetris and over a hundred other programs can be added to the mix if so desired (call them 'gadgets' if you like). And if you don't want to lug your laptop around with you, you can always pop the REX in your shirt or jeans pocket and leave the computer behind. Try that with the Asus! It is also a more elegant solution than taping a Pocket PC to your laptop as an auxiliary display.

I am not discounting Sideshow as a platform entirely, and there are some really exciting looking remote controls based on it being released soon, but in its current form it is not doing anything that couldn't be done years ago.