Rui CarmoAs usual, there’s a bunch of people griping about the lack of EV-DO or other flavors of mobile broadband connectivity on the MacBook Air, especially now that Toshiba is making noises regarding their revamped Portege line.
Even people in the US are starting to understand that Wi-Fi just doesn’t cut it and that WiMax is still on the pipedream stages, so here’s my Eur 0.02 regarding that:
If I had a MacBook Air today, all I needed to do to get up to 7.2Mbps (downstream) and up to 1.4Mbps (upstream) Internet access pretty much anywhere I wanted would be to (literally) stick in one of these:
Neat, huh? It’s the Huawei E172 USB HSUPA dongle, currently at Eur 129.89 via the local online store.
And it’s not just for Portugal (although we’re probably a bit better off in terms of coverage and whatnot): You can get it in the UK as well. And in a bunch of other places, too, because it’s being rolled out across “Europe“European as local operations adopt it.
Oh, and it ships with a USB extension cable in the box, for those of you worried about the Air’s rather finicky port layout.
Like Steve would say: “Available three months ago from today. And it’s sooo fast – I just click on a link, and Boom!”
Full disclosure: I work for Vodafone Portugal. I think it’s only natural to highlight some of the (awesomely cool) stuff we do, but I recommend you read my disclaimer anyway.
Previously: on Macs with built-in 3G, HSUPA launch, Mac OS X 3G support (2006).