HP DataPass Hands On Video

Correction: In the video it is stated that HP is working directly with Sprint on DataPass.HP is purchasing wholesale Sprint data capacity through Peregrine, a third-party company.

The service piggybacks, for now, on Sprint’s 3G network, and HP says that it’s service is available only in the U.S. at this point, but the computer-maker is looking into expanding the service in other territories. The great thing about HP DataPass is users can either choose to use it, choose to use another carrier’s mobile broadband offerings–like those through AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint, or choose to ignore mobile broadband together if they don’t need it.

With many laptops now coming with the option for a Gobi chipset, users don’t need to choose which carrier they want their notebooks to work with. The Gobi chip allows users to choose if they want Verizon Wireless, Sprint, or AT&T service after the point of sale as it is compatible with all three carrier’s mobile broadband 3G networks.

With more laptops coming with embedded 3G modems, meaning you won’t need a MiFi or a USB dongle to connect to your carrier’s Internet, having an inexpensive, short-term option for mobile broadband access may mean that you’ll be more productive on the road on the off chance that you can’t find a free WiFi hotspot.

HP DataPass Pricing

Essentially, you can buy data by time periods–between 5 hours and 30 days–or by the bucket–between 75 MB to 1 GB–whichever expires first. The service is similar to a pre-paid cellular service. Here’s the pricing breakdown:

• $5.00: 75 MB or 5 hours of use
• $10.00: 150 MB or 3 days of use
• $20.00: 450 MB or 14 days of use
• $30.00: 1 GB or 30 days of use

In the enterprise market, the service will be great for users who may not otherwise get their manager’s approval for a $50-$80 monthly service for 2 years at a time. HP explains that in many companies, users who may not be as high up on the totem pole can still have access to mobile broadband access while traveling and would be more easily able to expense their data charges without being tied to an expensive monthly contract.

Connecting to the service is easy and seamless through HP’s connection manager. Additionally, when you run out of time or data through your purchased bucket, you can reload at any time.

HP DataPass Brings Pre-Paid Mobile Broadband to HP Notebooks (Video) is a post by Chuong Nguyen from Notebooks.com.

The new webConnect pricing starts at $29.99 a month for 200MB which comes with a $.10 per MB overage fee after you go over 200MB. The next step up is a 5GB data plan which starts at $49.99 and will be the better fit for most users. Bump up to the 10GB plan for $84.99 a month if you really need a lot of mobile data.

Both the 5GB and 10GB monthly plans come without any overage fees, but your connection will be throttled to a slower speed once you go over 5GB or 10GB depending on your T-Mobile webConnect plan.

The T-Mobile webConnect plans listed above require a contract and include access to 3G and 4G data depending on your location. These plans come with a 20% discount if you have a T-Mobile Voice account, making the pricing much more palatable.

If you don’t want a contract, there are no commitment plans from T-Mobile which include 100MB of Data good for 7 days at $10, 300MB of Data valid for a month for $30 and 1 GB of data valid for one month for $50.

These data plans allow you to connect your notebook or other devices to the internet wherever you have a cell phone signal. Before you invest in a mobile broadband plan and sign a contract we suggest you evaluate your options including the possibility of using your phone as a personal hotspot. Many times you can add a tethering or mobile hotspot option to Android smart phones and the iPhone for less than the cost of a separate plan.

T-Mobile Rolls Out New webConnect Mobile Broadband Prices is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

First, when the software connects, unlike on the Windows PC software, the Verizon VZAccess Manager connection suite cannot report how much data has been used so far in the current billing period. Verizon offers a number of different 4G LTE data plans, but the two popular ones are 5 GB of data for $50 or 10 GB of data for $80. On the Windows side, every time you establish a connection through VZAccess Manager, a pop-up box appears telling you how much data you have consumed, which is important as overages will run you $10 per 1 GB of data. With faster connections, and if you’re heavily reliant on the 4G network, you’ll be eating through data quicker than you realize so it’s nice to be able to gauge how much data you’ve consumed so you can pace your usage to avoid overages. On OS X–I’m using Apple’s latest OS X 10.6.6–I get a pop-up box that says an error has occurred and I have never been able to get my month-to-date usage information on the Mac.

Second, connections are glitchy at best, especially if you put your computer to sleep without disconnecting first. On the top status bar, there is an icon at the top that will allow you to quickly connect to 4G LTE on the OS X environment. On my Mac, if I put the device to sleep, I would only be able to successfully re-connect via the VZAccess shortcut on the menu bar about 30% of the time. Most of the time, the system appears to connect to the Verizon network for a few seconds before disconnecting me. I find that when this happens, removing the USB modem and re-inserting it into the USB port would solve the problem. Other times, the VZAccess shortcut would disappear and I wouldn’t be able to re-connect until I restart my Mac.

Also, it seems that the connection speeds are somewhat slower than they are on the PC side. I am not sure why this is, but on the Mac, there is also a bit of latency when trying to open a webpage where there is a delay before the page begins to load. I haven’t had any of those experiences on the PC side.

Moreover, with Apple’s design, the USB modems are somewhat wider than a standard USB port. That means that when plugging the modem directly into the USB port, you’re going to cover up some ports next to the port you’re using. On my MacBook Pro 15-inch, for example, plugging in my USB modem covers up my Mini DisplayPort (now the ThunderBolt port on newer systems) and the USB port next to the one I am using. Since the MacBook Pro 15-inch only has two USB ports, I can’t insert another USB device. That problem is semi-mitigated with a USB extension cable that comes with the LG modem so that the modem won’t block nearby ports. On the Pantech modem, the USB modem can twist around to free up some room when you’re trying to access the nearby ports.

For now, because of the software limitations and the hardware design, I would urge Mac users to wait until Verizon releases the 4G MiFi unit from Novatel or a 4G mobile broadband router from Samsung–both products were announced earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show. Additionally, with 4G Android smartphones launching with mobile hotspot capabilities, those units may be better suited for Mac users as they won’t block adjacent ports and would connect over WiFi, mitigating the problem with glitchy VZAccess Manager connection software on OS X.

Verizon advertises download speeds of 5-10 Mbps and upload speeds between 2-5 Mbps, which is faster than most home DSL networks and rivals some slower cable connections. I am a huge fan of LTE speeds, but I just wished the experience for OS X users were better.

Why Mac Users Should Wait Before Joining Verizon’s 4G LTE Fray is a post by Chuong Nguyen from Notebooks.com.

For now, the laptop dock is priced at $500 retail, or about $300 when bundled together with a two-year agreement and the Atrix 4G purchase, bringing the package price to around $500 after rebates and pre-taxes.

What exactly is the laptop dock? It’s an accessory–a clamshell device with a screen, battery, keyboard, two USB expansion ports to accommodate USB drives, and speakers–that’s not unlike the appearance of a slim notebook, like the MacBook Air. The accessory has a swivel up dock at the rear for users to dock in their Atrix 4G dual-core smartphone. But this is where the similarities between the Motorola-branded accessory and a notebook/netbook ends as the laptop dock doesn’t have its own memory, RAM, CPU, drives, or OS. Rather, everything required to power and run the laptop dock in laptop mode comes from the NVIDIA Tegra 2-powered Atrix 4G. The smartphone hosts the Webtop operating system that provides power to use the smartphone OS on the larger screen and couples that with a keyboard, along with a full Firefox browser which can display full Flash content, not just the Flash 10.1 Mobile of most Android smartphones.

However, despite the low price of entry–$500 for a combined package isn’t a bad deal, but then again you can buy an entry-level netbook for $300, the price of the dock as part of the packaged deal–the costs start to add up when you add in the data plan. While users can subscribe to a $25 per month data plan (or cheaper if you’re solely on WiFi) for the Atrix 4G, the laptop dock requires users to sign up for a tethering plan, which runs $45 for the combined total between the smartphone and the tethering portion for 4 GB of data per month.

The absurdity here is the tethering catch, which is required to use with the laptop dock. When a user docks their smartphone with the laptop dock, the Android OS or Webtop OS checks with AT&T’s servers to ensure that you have the right data plan to use with the laptop dock. Since the Webtop OS and everything really required for use in the laptop dock is really housed inside the Atrix smartphone, data really is generated from the smartphone, not from the laptop, so is it really tethering?

The total cost of ownership (TCO) breakdown of the Atrix 4G laptop dock initially appeared on The Droid Guys. The site initially priced the full $45 data plan into the cost of the laptop dock, bringing the TCO to about $1400, but that figure has since been amended. Hypothetically, if you had gone ahead and signed up for the 2 GB per month $25 plan, tethering via the the Data Pro Plan is an extra $20 a month, which is what really is required for the Laptop Dock as the basic smartphone data plan is already required with the phone regardless of the dock. So calculating $20 over 24 months of your contract, the data charge specific to the laptop dock is $480 before taxes and fees are added. The cost of the laptop dock itself is another $300 when purchased as bundle, so you’re looking at a minimum of around $800 pre-taxes, or about $1,000 if the laptop dock was purchased at the full $500 price without the bundle.

While the cost here isn’t bad, the $300 price of the dock itself can land you a cheap netbook, but the $800 price point of the combined package can give you a decent notebook. True, the laptop dock does give you a seamless experience when tethering and connecting to the Internet on a larger screen and keyboard, how much is that mobility and ubiquitous connectivity worth to you?

With rooting and jailbreaking these days, which has been legalized under the revised Digital Millennium Copyright Act, users can hack their devices to uncover features and functionalities of their smartphones legally that were hidden by the manufacturer and carrier. With rooting on Android, users have found ways to tether for free by either running a third-party tethering program or uncovering the native tethering functionality of Android that came with Android 2.2 Froyo but was hidden, as is the case of the Atrix 4G, by the carrier–or AT&T. By uncovering the tethering, users can invest their $800 into a more capable notebook–an entry level MacBook Air starts at $1,000, and if you didn’t purchase the laptop dock as a package with a service contract with the Atrix 4G, you’re looking at $500 for the dock, plus $480–or roughly $1,000 right there. If you like the seamless way that the Atrix 4G interacts with the laptop dock, the cost to participate is between $800-$1,000. If you’re sensible about your computing needs and can afford some time and invest energy into rooting, I’d highly suggest going the latter route and getting a descent notebook and tethering it that way.

The True Cost of the Motorola Atrix 4G Laptop Dock: $800, Phone Not Included is a post by Chuong Nguyen from Notebooks.com.

LTE-Advanced is an evolution of 4G technology, much in the same way that HSPA+ is an evolution of HSPA 3G technology. The latter HSPA+, although a 3G evolution, is being marketed in the U.S. as a 4G protocol by carriers AT&T and T-Mobile USA due to the fast speeds of the network which they claim is comparable to speeds offered by rival 4G standards like LTE and WiMax–used by Sprint.

With LTE-Advanced, speeds are expected to reach 1 Gbps and the standard is expected to be finalized in the second half of this year according to general manager Mike Wang for Nokia Siemens. Commercial deployment of this new LTE-Advanced–we’ll refer to it as 4G+–won’t be expected until several years from now. However, the good news is that carriers, like AT&T and Verizon which will adopt or are adopting LTE, won’t have to upgrade their tower hardware and would just need to program a software update to broadcast faster upload and download speeds. The bad news is that users would still need to upgrade their handsets as USB modems, smartphones, and feature phones that will be released over the next several years probably won’t support the new 4G+ standards.

Currently, with 4G LTE, Verizon Wireless is promising speeds of up to 10 times faster than 3G speeds. The carrier is promising upload speeds of up to 2-5 Mbps and download speeds of between 5-10 Mbps.

Via: DigiTimes

Faster 4G Underway Thanks to LTE-Advanced is a post by Chuong Nguyen from Notebooks.com.

LTE has been selected as a standard by AT&T and Verizon Wireless in the U.S. Sprint, an early 4G adopter, had rolled out WiMax and launched the HTC EVO 4G as the first 4G Android smartphone in the U.S., which can connect to the carrier’s 3G CDMA EV-DO network and 4G WiMax where available. In addition to the HTC EVO 4G and USB dongles, Sprint also launched the Sprint Overdrive, a portable mobile hotspot router that will allow up to 5 devices to connect to and share the mobile broadband connection via WiFi. The carrier is will also launch an improved MiFi unit that supports 4G WiMax.

The decision to consider LTE as a 4G protocol came out of a round table discussion from Sprint’s Bob Azzi along with its hardware partners. According to the carrier, it will continue to study customer adoption rate of WiMax in the next four to six months before it decides on LTE.

That decision is part of Sprint’s overhaul plan to install new multi-mode towers to reduce network costs. The carrier is also in the phase of winding down its Nextel iDEN operations, which would give it more bandwidth and spectrum should it decide to roll out a WiMax and LTE network.

Depending on how manufacturers make phones and the spectrums and frequencies that devices support, if Sprint adopts LTE, a multi-band LTE smartphone may be able to roam on rival networks if Sprint inks an agreement with AT&T and Verizon, which would help improve coverage at this early phase of 4G deployment. With WiMax, Sprint is the lone major cellular company that’s invested in that protocol, reducing the ability to roam.

For laptop use, I’ve experienced faster speeds on Verizon’s nascent LTE network, averaging download speeds between 5 and 20 Mbps on average and upload speeds between 2 and 10 Mbps–Verizon only promises 5-10 Mbps on the download side and 2-5 Mbps on the upload. In the Bay Area where Sprint recently launched 4G WiMax, both download and upload speeds were considerably slower than the 3-6 Mbps and 1-3 Mbps that Sprint had quoted respectively, though the speeds where much faster when Sprint had initially announced the HTC EVO 4G in Las Vegas, NV at CTIA.

Via: Fierce Wireless

Sprint Still Considering LTE as Mobile Broadband Standard for Use is a post by Chuong Nguyen from Notebooks.com.

For laptops and data devices, such as the company’s newly released MiFi 2372, it looks like AT&T may be slashing its monthly data prices according to a leaked internal document that was posted on Engadget. The maximum plan for 5 GB of data–on notebooks and netbooks as well as on the MiFi and other USB modems–AT&T will be cutting $10 from the plan, bringing the 5 GB monthly subscription to $50 per month. Overages will be $10 per GB.

Additionally, for the MiFi, AT&T is adding a 3 GB tier priced at $35 per month, which increases the data allotment from a paltry 200 MB from before for the same price. The new 3 GB for $35 will also have $10 per GB overage.

For smartphone users who are looking at tethering, the company will be increasing the metered data to 4 GB for a total of $45 per month. The 4 GB of data will be shared in the same bucket as data consumed via tethering as well as data consumed natively on a user’s smartphone.

AT&T Slashes Price on Data Pricing for Laptops is a post by Chuong Nguyen from Notebooks.com.

According to Hendricks, who subscribes to the carrier’s $15 data plan for 200 MB per month of data, AT&T had charged him for 259 data transactions, which added up to 223 MB of data, in a month. Many of those transaction, alleges Hendricks, is for phantom data transactions that he never initiated.

A consulting firm had purchased an iPhone from an AT&T store to verify Hendrick’s claim. That firm had turned off email, push notifications, and closed all apps, but was still charged for 35 data transactions over a 10-day span that resulted in 2,292 KB of data use. While the number may seem small, over-billing a lot of customers has a huge net effect on AT&T’s bottom line, Hendrick says.

The lawsuit is filed for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and other claims. Hendricks is asking for damages as well as costs according to PC Mag.

The issue of phantom data transaction on an iPhone has appeared in various blogs and news media outlets in the past. However, the issue is especially pertinent today as AT&T has stopped offering the option to subscribe to an unlimited plan effective June 2010. The carrier, prior to the launch of the iPhone 4, has stopped offering its $30 unlimited (with a fine print cap of 5 GB of data per month) plan in favor of a metered and tiered usage model. The maximum data plan currently is for 2 GB of data per month at a cost of $25. With phantom data charges and over-stated data use by AT&T’s reporting, if Hendrick’s allegations are correct, users stand to be charged more by AT&T.

Phantom data use has also plagued Microsoft recently in the news with the company’s Windows Phone 7 smartphone devices. According to Microsoft, synchronization problems with Yahoo! email may be to blame for that issue.

Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against AT&T for Incorrect Data Billing is a post by Chuong Nguyen from Notebooks.com.

With its nascent–but rapidly growing–4G LTE network, Verizon Wireless had introduced users in major metropolitan areas in the U.S. to mobile broadband speeds that rivaled or even exceeded wired broadband speeds. To take advantage of its 4G network, the carrier had introduced two LTE USB modems for laptops in December–the LG VL600 and the Pantech UML290. At the devices’ unveiling, Verizon only offered Windows PC support, but now the appropriate Mac drivers are available for OS X users to experience 4G network with the Pantech UML290 modem.

Support for Mac is still not available for the LG modem, but will be forthcoming according to the carrier.

Users of Pantech’s 4G modem can head on over to Verizon Wireless’s support page to download the appropriate drivers for official Mac support.

In the past, users have found unofficial workarounds to get Pantech’s modem to work on a Mac. Now, Mac users, including those who sport the MacBook Air, MacBook, and MacBook Pro, can enjoy faster mobile broadband speeds, and as Verizon says, “rule the air.”

Verizon promises speeds of 10 times faster than 3G speeds on its next-generation mobile broadband network. The carrier is promising download speeds of between 5-10 Mbps and upload speeds of 2-5 Mbps. In reality, I found that Verizon had under-promised and over-delivered on its 4G speeds; in real-life testing, I find that download speeds were hovering on average of 7-15 Mbps and upload speeds were regularly in excess of 5 Mbps.

Verizon Rolling Out Mac Support for 4G LTE USB Modem is a post by Chuong Nguyen from Notebooks.com.

Virgin Mobile isn’t the first carrier to take this type of stance, in which the data rates will typically drop to 100kbps or lower, but it is a disappointed to see another “unlimited” plan get shackled with asterisks and usage limits. Virgin Mobile users can get around the data throttling by purchasing another 5GB “unlimited” plan for $40, but that defeats the benefit of an unlimited plan.

Virgin Mobile still offers one of the best values for data users who don’t want to be tied down to a contract, but it will be interesting to see how this dynamic changes as more phones begin to act as a mobile hotspot. Especially since the Verizon iPhone will have a mobile hotspot feature with what it appears will be a truly unlimited 3G connection. It’s not immediately clear if there is a premium for using the mobile hotspot on the iPhone, but if there is, Verizon typically treats that as an option you can turn on and off without affecting your contract, much like a non contract MiFi.

Virgin Mobile Unlimited BroadBand2Go Plans to be Throttled Starting Feb. 15 is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.