Verizon 3G Mobile Hotspot Service Mini-Review
I recently traveled to Grand Rapids, MI, for the State Bar of Michigan’s annual meeting. [As an aside, Grand Rapids is a great place to visit. It has a clean. safe, and lively downtown, good restaurants, and several fine museums.] The conference center hosting the meeting had public Wi-Fi, but it was account-based and required paying a $50 fee. That was a bit steep for the two-day access I needed. So I tethered my Verizon Wireless Droid X to my Toshiba Mini 10 netbook via USB cable using the simple
June Fabrics PdaNet Android application. PdaNet sells for a reasonable $15.95 (limited time offer, according to the web site). There are also PdaNet tethering apps for the
iPhone,
Windows Mobile, and
Blackberry. Everything worked perfectly – for me.
Then a colleague and friend sitting behind me at the Family Law Section’s annual meeting asked if I was able to get Internet access without paying the conference center’s steep fee. I showed him tethering arrangement, but apologized that I could not share it with him (this type of tethering works only for one device at a time and requires the companion software to be installed on the tethered computer).
I remembered that my Droid X had the capability to be used as a
wireless Wi-Fi hotspot using its 3G data connection. So I excused myself, went into the hallway and called Verizon’s customer service to activate the 3G hotspot option for me phone. I then returned to the meeting room, started the phone’s built-in 3G hotspot app, selected a password, and within a few seconds the phone was in hotspot mode. I connected my netbook to the phone’s Wi-Fi network, wrote the password on a scrap of paper, and passed it to my colleague behind me. We both had a productive hour or so on-line taking care of business while listening to committee reports. In fact, the connection was fast enough (four bars of 3G signal at this location) that I was able to remote into my home/office desktop PC using LogMeIn (free version), run PCLaw to generate a bill, and then email the bill to co-counsel in a case I was working on.
The 3G mobile hotspot session took a bit of a toll on my Droid X’s battery, but not too much. It went from full to just over three quarters full (about 78% capacity). From my experience with the Droid X, the original Motorola Droid (passed along to my wife when I got the Droid X), and my daughter’s Droid Incredible, I’d rate the Droid X’s battery life as best among the three despite its larger screen. The Incredible is the worst of the three in terms of battery life. I use the free
Advanced Task Killer with some
tweaked settings to extend my battery life, and it seems to work well.
In a later session, I decided to try the Droid X’s 3G hotspot function to connect my
Augen Android Tablet to the Internet so I could review several PDF documents emailed to me by a client on its larger 7 inch screen rather than pull out my netbook or struggle to read them on my phone’s screen. I started the hotspot function with a couple of screen taps on the phone, typed in the network’s password on the Augen tablet, and I was connected to the Internet almost immediately. Although my Droid X has the largest cell phone screen available, the extra screen real estate on the 7″ Augen tablet makes it noticeably easier to read PDF or other documents. Surprisingly, the Augen tablet fit into my inside suit coat pocket (on both suits I packed for the meeting). It was light enough to carry around that way without feeling like a burden. Although the Augen tablet is an early and somewhat flawed example of an Android tablet, I predict that the 7 inch form-factor for Android (or Windows 7) tablets will be hugely popular. It is a “just right” screen size for this type of device. The 5″ Dell Streak is too small and 10″ (such as the iPad) is too large.
The cost of the Verizon 3G hotspot service on the Droid X is $20 monthly. Like most cell phone services, you can call Verizon and turn it on or off depending on whether you plan to be traveling much in a given month. It is certainly a much less expensive option than buying a Verizon Mi-Fi mobile hotspot device and paying the roughly $60 monthlycontract fees to its use. Both services allow up to five devices to be simultaneously connected to Internet via Wi-Fi. I suspect that Mi-Fi device will provide a somewhat faster connection because it is a single-purpose device designed for that function. The top-tier Mi-Fi plan allows 5 GB’s per month of data transfer before you are surcharged. The phone-based hotspot service has a 2 GB limit before surcharges are incurred.
I don’t have much travel planned again until November, so I may call Verizon to turn the service off until then. But it is nice to know it is just a phone call away.
