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3 Mi-Fi – The Complete Review

March 10th, 2010

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ll know that I recently ordered the 3 Mi-Fi Pay as you Go. Well, today it has arrived! And here’s my review…

First of all, it’s very light. No heavier than my mobile phone (Nokia 3120 Classic). It’s a tiny bit longer than a credit card but not as wide. Very small.

On the device, there are 3 switches. The first one powers the device, the second turns wi-fi on/off and the third turns data on/off. I’m not going to go into tonnes of detail – if you aren’t sure how to use on call 3 or browse the web – there are tonnes of guides. GEEK! tells you the thing you won’t see on other sites.

Here are some important things you may want to know:

  • The SIM on the £49.99 single PAYG Mi-Fi comes with £1 credit on it. This isn’t much, but it gives you enough to kick you off. I’m not sure how much data that actually is but I’ve browsed quite a few sites on it without topping it up and I still have £1 on it.
  • How it charges is a little odd. When you’ve got it plugged into a PC, you can turn it on and it will still charge – even put wi-fi on, but as soon as you switch data on it will stop charging. It continues to power itself by USB but will not charge when data is active.
  • You have to use My3 to check your balance online. According to 3, I can still do this from my Mi-Fi connection even when my credit is out but haven’t tested it as yet. I will confirm when I can.
  • The microSD slot on the device only shows up on USB. It is not shared over wi-fi.

Those are some facts you may want to know. If there’s anything else you’d live to know, email me.

Overall, I’m really happy. It works very well and is so convenient. It might be quite expensive in terms of bandwidth, but prices will decrease with time.

If you need mobile interet on your devices easily, this is what you need.

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Cloud Unlimted Music review – unlimited public wi-fi for the iPod Touch

February 16th, 2010

Get unlimited wi-fi for your iPod Touch at a tiny price

I recently subscribed to The Cloud’s iPod Touch service, dubbed “Cloud Unlimited Music”. It is a service designed specifically for the iPod Touch and gives unlimited browsing and downloading at The Cloud’s wi-fi hotspots for just £3.99 per month.

I decided it was worth it as it is handy to have instant internet access in many public train station. The company’s hotspots can be found in many public places – such as train stations, pubs, hotels, restaurants and as most O2 stores. Considering the small price, I can head out and just catch my emails or finish a download.

I’m really impressed at how well the system works. I signed up and added my debit card as payment, and then 2 days later (today) headed out to my local town to try it out. I walked into an O2 shop and tried to connect. Straight away I was on the net – no need to log on or anything like that.

You don’t need to log on because the system works by checking your iPod’s MAC address rather than a username or password. When you sign up, you provide your device’s MAC address and your account is locked to that code. By doing this, it means that you no longer have to log on when joining a hotspot.

In addition, I was also really impressed at the speeds. My local O2 store gave me a download speed of over 8 megabits per second (which is more than twice the speed of my home broadband).

So overall, I’m very happy with it. It’s great value and works very efficiently. If you need wi-fi access for your iPod Touch in town – this is for you.

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Which virtual host do you choose for virtual machines?

January 22nd, 2010

I find this to be a very difficult decision. There are quite a few pieces of software that will, essentially, do the same job. However I seem to believe that some are better than others.

In this post I’m going to try and show which piece of virtual machine software I prefer any why I like it.

If you’re looking for free software (which I generally do – who doesn’t?) you’ve basically got three choices – VMware Player, Microsoft Virtual PC (which seems to be getting outdated, but still works fine), and VirtualBox.

Here’s the order in which I would choose them:

  1. VirtualBox – I have to say I like VirtualBox the most. It’s fast and has a very tidy interface that is easy to use. I tried all three pieces of software on the same machine and it was noticeable that this piece of software was most responsive and most effecient – especially when using Windows guest machines. It doesn’t have the handy quick install feature that VMware has, but the speedy performance definitely makes up for that. Sadly it doesn’t support FAT32 file splitting, which is a shame if the hard drive you want to run it on is FAT32 as you wont be able to make virtual hard drives bigger than 4GB. However, I do think that it does work most efficiently and has the best interface.
  2. Microsoft Virtual PC – Despite the fact that Microsoft seem to be trying to phase this out (with the launch of XP Mode in Windows 7) it is still a very good virtual machine host. It not only has a clean interface, but it’s native virtual disk format supports FAT32 file splitting, so you’ll be able to run virtual hard disks on drives that run FAT32 without the 4GB file size limitation. However, I find it to be quite slow. Even when you are performing simple tasks (such as clicking the Start menu in the guest machine) it can take ages to respond. Also, it seems to be designed more for Windows guests, as it’s “Other” host option is very vague. I like Virtual PC more than VMware, but I’d still choose VirtualBox any day.
  3. VMware Player – This is my least favourite piece of software. Despite it being a very popular company who makes VMware Player, I still think it really isn’t up to regular virtual machine jobs. The main thing I can’t stand about VMware Player is the interface – I find it so clunky and unhelpful. I also find it the slowest of the three in terms of performance. It seems to cope pretty well with most operating systems, but the lack of speed makes VMware annoying at times. It does have the Easy Install feature – which is designed to make OS installation much more simple by automatically running through the process, but I’ve never found that particularly useful.

So there you go – if you want a decent, free virtual machine host I’d recommend VirtualBox to you.

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