Vodafone Mobile Wi-Fi R201 Review

 

I recently got my hands on one of these Wireless Mobile Wi-Fi units and thought I’d give a quick review of what they are like.

The unit itself is about as wide and high as a standard playing card, maybe a tiny bit bigger, while the height of the unit is about 1 centimetre.It has a micro usb slot for charging and comes with a cable that can either be plugged into your laptop to charge, or into the supplied mains adaptor.

Physical setup of the unit couldn’t be easier as you just pop the back off, slide the sim card in, click the battery into place then close it back up again. Note that there is also a space for a micro sdhc card located under the back cover as well.

Getting connected to the unit was also very easy and simply required making a note of the WPA2 key on a sticker under the back cover and then using Windows to connect to the network. The unit has a built in DHCP server handing out addresses between 192.168.0.100 – 200 while the admin interface is located on 192.168.0.1

The basic interface looks like this

Within this interface you can configure any port forwards that you want to do, change your Wi-Fi settings (SSID, password, authentication type, MAC security etc), as well as using it to send/receive SMS.

Real life usage:

I tested the unit throughout my house where the signal strength varies quite a lot. In good reception areas where I was getting a full signal strength and connecting via 3G I was getting about 3 megs download, 1 Meg upload (according to speedtest.net).

Where the signal dropped to 2 bars (but still on 3G) I was getting about 1 Meg down and just under 1 Meg up

In both cases simple web browsing was fine and caused me no problems. Any kind of gaming on this would probably be out but for normal emaily, facebooky type of stuff I don’ think you would run into any problems. YouTube clips also were fine to watch and didn’t have to stop to buffer at all.

Conclusion:

All in all this device does what it says on the box. I have only tested it with 1 device connected to the Wi-Fi so am unsure how it would fair with multiple devices running at the same time but daresay that it would be fine. Vodafone claims that up to 5 devices can be connected at once.

So for now a thumbs up. I’m taking this device away on holiday so I can setup an access point at the Bach for everyone to get internet ( as we have no landline for adsl). For the size, cost (currently $199) and ease of setup I think that this is a winner.