Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Tag Archives: Carphone Warehouse

Personal WiFi for the Traveller

I have always found it useful to have a way of getting online when overseas. Sometimes it is painful (like my recent trip to France) and sometimes it is painless (like on my trips to the less sunny Dublin). Whichever location you go to though you can be sure that you can get a local Prepay/PAYG data SIM card that just needs to be put into the right device to give you a data connection. I have been favouring an unlocked MiFi device but in my recent troubles I needed to do more debugging that what was possible on the MiFi. I made use of an unlocked Android phone and it provided the best service it could considering the lousy service I was on (Orange FR was appalling).

The key is getting one that is unlocked or is easy to unlock, and I made use of the very unlockable Orange San Francisco (ZTE Blade). At least I could once I also put Android 2.2 on the device. It was a very effective Personal WiFi device over there and I am now definitely looking to replace my older MiFi device with the Android, most obviously because it also offers access to the voice services necessary in many locations to update the credit as well as the use of a local voice number if I so required (my current tariff with O2 makes that very optional).

For those of you who are not into unlocking (and a bit of rooting!) then I do suggest digging through the phones on display to find an Android 2.2 or above device and getting it unlocked. I do recommend checking out Carphone Warehouse for Prepay deals as their phones do tend to be unlocked to allow them to sell on any network but make sure that the phone is an Android 2.2 or above to get the built-in WiFi Tethering. The latest deals for the Sony Experia X10 Mini look interesting but you will have to look at some of the third party mechanisms for WiFi Tethering if you do purchase that one as it is 2.1 or even earlier by default.

Netbooks Returns

There has been some noise floating out there about the return rate on Linux based netbooks. Now I would like to see some more detail about this, as I could expect a certain lack of familiarity causing some people to return machines, but not at the scale being reported.

What is interesting about the date from the latest news, is that there is focus on one specific type of netbook that is being sold via the Carphone Warehouse stores. This netbook is the Elonex Webbook, a machine that is notable for using the Via C7 processor. Although clocked at a healthy 1.6GHz, machines based on these processors are really not fit for purpose and I feel that this is more likely to be behind the high return rate, as well as the miserly 512MB of RAM.

Using Linux is no excuse for being miserly with processor or RAM, and this can be shown that the newest releases of netbooks are pretty much Intel Atom Processor only, and have at least 1GB of RAM.

My own experience has shown that the machines with lower processors (in my case Celeron 630MHz) and RAM (512MB), do not work regardless of the OS – the applications that ordinary people want to run (basic wordprocessing and Internet) quickly uses that up. I can see the same thing happening with Netbooks with Vista running on them, these things are proven not to be functional for lightweight machines.

Upgrade Packs

For those people who have purchased machines with Linux on them, and truly feel the need for running a Microsoft product, there should be upgrade packs sold which include Windows XP Home on an SD Card or Memory stick which would allow in-place upgrade of these units. This should not cost more that £50 as long as Microsoft got over its hang-up about XP. Of course this is only for those machines that have the realistic minimum of RAM – 1GB. This is all possible, after all my current main machine, the Advent 4211, has a recovery mechanism based on a 2GB SD Card.