Sprint Novatel U720 Review
Well my Sprint Novatel USB Ovation U720 arrived yesterday and after three tries with Sprint was able to get the ESN from my old card swapped to this new one. Overall the performance is great but I was surprised to see that the you have to use a Dual USB Port Dongle with the unit. Thus running the device on your laptop requires the utilisation of two USB ports.
The antenna access for the device is under the flip-up antenna and I am already concerned about the longevity of the card as looking down into the antenna port hole I do not see a lot of supporting material in and around the connection. Only time will tell if the external port will hold up or not.
This card is Rev A. capable but seeing Hawaii does not get Rev A. till the first of the year I will not be able to report on speeds. In download speed test the unit is comparable in transfer speeds of the PCMCIA version of this card.
I think the folks at Novatel would have been smart of they would have provided a power port for the USB card so as to allowed those that were using it in a permanent location to not have to use two USB ports to run the device.
I paid full retail for this card as I had existing service so I am hoping that in the long run this card works out ok. Meanwhile I have a Sprint PC-5740 card for sale if anyone wants to purchase it.
Update: The Novatel U720 does work with the Kyocera KR-1, I was concerned about this, but my testing here validates the KR1 works with the U720!
April 23rd, 2007 at 2:06 am
re: Ovation U720 wireless modem & Limewire. Recently purchased HP notebook — running Vista and Sprint / Novatel U720 wireless modem. On used to have great results with Limewire on my XP desktop PC & land-line broadband. With this system, at first I was getting fair to poor results — now all I get is “need more sources.” I’m running newest versions of LW Pro and Java. Also, Norton AV, Spybot SD and AdAware. All of which I used to use on my pc w/o problems! Any suggestions? This computer, O.S. and modem have all been trouble since day one!
April 24th, 2007 at 8:41 am
To be honest, think limewire has had its day… I have very little luck with it theese days…. You opened limewires ports in your firewall? Try bittorrent also. You can get everything you will ever need with that….