What's In the Box

When you get hold of the USB Modem you will get a Vodafone sim card, USB Modem stick, an instruction manual and a USB extension cable.

Design

Whilst there is not much to mention about the design, mainly because it is just a USB stick, it does look smart with its white smooth finish and Vodafone logo etched within the casing. The cap is connected to the USB stick with a cord, which allows you to attach the modem to your keying and will also stop the cap from being lost in the process.

Looking on the Vodafone website, certain versions of the Modem will also include a microSD card slot for turning the stick into a storage medium.

Finally the sim card itself slots into a slide out cradle that neatly merges within the USB stick.

Installation

Installation was a piece of cake, with the software being supplied on the USB stick it should automatically run the modem driver installation when you insert this into an empty USB port - XP/Vista PC/Laptop (it does work with MAC OS X to).

Then it will start to load the connection software (which will also start every time the USB stick is inserted into your PC/Laptop) and then automatically detect the USB Modem.

Finally a quick press of the'Connect' button will start to authenticate the modem onto the Vodafone Network.

In Use

As mentioned above the setup is quite easy, but if you are having any trouble with the authentication process it is because the data sim needs validating, so contact Vodafone to do this.

You also need to be aware that the USB Modem is using a sim card, which means it has all the latter’s pros and cons. So for example if you are in an area that does not have 3G rolled out you can only use 2G speeds, also signal strength/interference can affect the service as well.

We found that using the supplied USB extension cable was a good option to help gain 3G speeds, mainly because it allows you to position the USB stick in different positions to pick up the strongest signal.

For our tests we only used a desktop PC and not a laptop (which would be its ideal platform). However the supplied USB extension cable was maybe a bit too short for our next experiment, so we grabbed a longer replacement so we could dangle the modem out of the Window, thus picking up a stronger signal and 3G+ speeds (7.2MBPS). We managed to get nearly 6MBPS in a some of our real world tests when using this little trick.

Of course if you are on a train you may find this impossible to do, but the supplied USB extension cable, alongside a bit of bluetac can be useful for sticking the modem to a window, it sounds daft, but raising the modem does help the device to pick up a better signal.

As mentioned earlier when you insert the modem it will load up its connection software and in here - before you click on connect - you have a couple of settings that you can adjust which will determine how you use the Modem Stick. For example you can instruct the software to either automatically, prompted or manually connect to the Vodafone network. We opted for the manual approach for our tests which gave us more control.

You can also set a limit on your daily data usage if you are concerned about going over the 3GB a month limit (though we would think it would be unlikely that you would do this, but it is still a nice touch).

There is also an SMS piece of software that allows you to treat the Modem as a normal text based device, so you will find an Inbox, Drafts, Sent items box and contacts. The text entry screen allows 160 words per message, which is all standard stuff.

Additionally you can set your preferred network preference. We set this to 3G preferred, which means it will still work even if 3G is not available.

For testing we utilised the 2G network to start with and to be honest the product is not worth having in this mode. Whilst we admit the connection was rock steady, we did some basic web browsing and downloaded a smallish 2.1mb email attachment, with 3.89mb downloaded in total at the end of the test. We then looked at the timer and this had taken over 17 minutes, with the email taking at least 10/12 minutes of this time by our estimates.

For uploading we used an ftp program to send a 54.6k file up to our test server and this took about 17seconds.

Next up we went into the 3G tests and now that Vodafone are rolling out there fast 7.2Mbps speeds the difference was impressive.

A 9MB mp3 file was downloaded in 31.55 seconds and a 333k file uploaded to our test server took 12 seconds and a 1.5MB file in 43seconds. You can also opt for a faster HSUPA (2Mbps) upload speed service if you so wish (at an extra cost).

Again the connection was stable throughout our 3G test, but because we wanted to push the modem even further, we then decided to play a bit of Battlefield 2 with the USB Modem as our main connection.

To be honest we did not expect it to even run the game properly due to the demands placed on modems during online gaming.

When refreshing the server list we found the lowest server to have a ping of 175, which is still doable (though not ideal) and in the game we had pings as low as 134.

We managed to play the game for a few minutes, taking out a couple of vehicles in the process with our Anti-tank rockets, that is until the signal strength dropped slightly and then it became too unstable to move properly.