Huawei E585 Mobile Wifi (3 Mifi)
 

Bought this off eBay, there are a bunch of sellers who've unlocked the "3" branded devices.

So I don't really have a prepaid SIM right now. Plan is to use one for trips in Europe.

But I powered it up and connected to the Wifi network. First of all, poor latency to the device, just pinging 192.168.1.1, getting 5-10 ms.

So the admin page loads very slowly and then stops loading after a few pages. Had to power it off and, turn it back on, reconnect, to load those pages.

Has anyone used this model before (hoping some members in the UK might have)?

Is this performance typical or do I have a lemon? Can't imagine putting in a SIM would make a difference in the performance between the device and the Wifi clients I'd connect to it. Guess I could put in my iPhone 3GS SIM and see.

Had a little better luck, managed to save a profile and change the SSID and passwords.

Latency still seems higher than it should be. Maybe the processor isn't worth anything on these things. Maybe an unlocked Android or Symbian phone would have provided better performance running hotspot software.

Or maybe Novatel would have been worth paying $100-120 more.

I tried putting the AT&T iPhone SIM and it kept trying to connect and disconnected. Probably needed to change the APN but it defaulted to "dynamic" so probably need to change it to manual with an APN value that I know works.

Also not sure about login password and possibly changing the dial string.

But in any event, the AT&T signal is only 2G because this device probably doesn't support the right band for US.

Will have to wait until I get to Italy next month to try my Wind SIM.