Sprint AirCard 595U
One thing I did on this trip was give my boss my Verizon Wireless V620 PC-card, which allows me to get high-speed Internet access anywhere Verizon Wireless had service. A couple of problems with this arrangement: that PC-card wouldn’t work on my Mac and Verizon Wireless has only 1XRTT service in my neck of the woods. I was happy to give the card to my boss so I could get a USB EVDO card on Sprint, which I happen to know has EVDO service in my area from testing that HTC Mogul Qwest sent me to review.
I stopped at the Sprint Store on Van Ness when I was up in The City last week–San Francisco, for those of you who aren’t from the Bay Area–and picked up the Sprint AirCard 595U. It happened to be one of the more painless experiences I’ve had buying anything from a wireless carrier. The rep didn’t try and upsell me on stuff I didn’t want, he asked for the minimum amount of information, and the transaction went smoothly.
Getting the AirCard working on my Lenovo X60s laptop was a little bit of a challenge. Mostly because the X60s lacks a CD-Rom so I can load the drivers. No problem, I just pulled them off the web over WiFi. Got them installed and was off and running fairly quickly.
One thing that annoyed me about the Sprint Connection Manager software is that it also wanted to take over managing my WiFi connections. I don’t want that. Took me a while to figure out how to disable this function in the Sprint CM software, but I finally did. It would have been nice if it asked me first before changing the settings for things like that.
The speed in Mountain View, CA where I did a lot of my testing was pretty solid. It was more consistent than my connection to either GoogleWiFi or the hotel’s WiFi network. The USB adapter is a bit bigger than my Verizon PC-card, but it still fits nicely in my bag.
Hopefully the day job will soon incorporate my Sprint account into the corporate account so I don’t have this $60/month plus taxes and BS fees to expense for the next two years.
