Nothing scientific or empirical to report just yet as I’ve been running around quite a bit with appointments. One of those travels was taking Sydney to her two-hour gymnastics class last night. The Samsung Q1P wasn’t fully charged so I lugged the MacBook Pro and Sierra Wireless 875U AirCard. Although integrated WWAN is a great option for some folks, I use too many devices on the go for that solution and this is a perfect example of why. Sierra Wireless offers a free Mac OS X client for the 875U; it’s not as full featured as the AT&T Communications Manager for Windows, but it did the trick last night.
JKK of JKKMobile offered up a comment last night on the 875U video indicating that it should use less power than WiFi.That sounds right based on my use last night. The Mac showed around 3hours of battery charge when I powered it up last night. I used the875U for a good 1.5 hours and the Mac showed about 1 hour and 20minutes of battery charge after that. I usually use the gym’s WiFi andthe battery is definitely eaten up faster when I do. [They’re on to mehowever; they’ve shut down the WiFi about two weeks ago.] Needless tosay, I used the modem on the Mac the entire time last night andobserved much less power drain on the battery than I usually do when using the WiFi. I’ll be monitoring the actual power drain with Notebook Hardware Control on the Q1P over the next few days.
I should also mention that the gym is not in a 3G or HSDPA coveragearea, so I was confined to EDGE. That could explain some (or all) ofthe perceived low power use of the modem since 3G is notorious foreating batteries up quickly. Oh and for the fashion conscious: thegunmetal gray and silver modem matches the color of the MacBook Proquite well. Hey, at least we can look good when surfing slowly on EDGE,right?
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