I’ve been using the V740 ExpressCard SvenOnTech told you about upon its announcement the day before my birthday for a few days now and I must say, I’m mighty impressed. I just got back from a press meeting in San Mateo and I popped in the ExpressCard into my MacBook Pro while sitting in my Super Duty in the CalTrain parking lot. Within a few seconds, I was online.

I opened Firefox and Tab Mix Plus opened all the tabs from my previous session. The pages started loading and then — ZAP! — lost my connection. I went back up to the menu icon, the one that looks like the signal bars on your phone, and selected Connect from the menu. Again, I was online within a few seconds and I then refreshed the dead tabs. This time, no drop off from my connection.

I spent a good 30 minutes surfing and downloading. I downloaded a 5 and 10 MB file and both came down fairly fast peaking at 170 KB per second. Basically, what I use to get from my cable modem a couple of years ago…which back then I considered very fast. (Today, with a 6 Mb connection, I’m a bit spoiled. ) Today, on a remote laptop without a Wi-Fi connection around, I consider this very fast, too. In fact, in my surfing, I hit blogs with many pictures, sites with heavy content and graphics, and even pages with Flash video. Everything pretty much downloaded quickly and if you really didn’t pay attention to the downloading of the web page, it really did seem as if I were back in the office on my cable modem. Heck, it felt faster than some DSL connections I’ve seen in the past week! EV-DO is probably the first remote broadband access that is usable, unlike GPRS or EDGE (the narrow pipe that will funnel content to Apple’s iPhone.) No agitation on my part while surfing.

Anyway, I’ll be sporting a full review on this card soon. I will be going to Tucson for business/pleasure soon and will be definitely testing it there and most importantly, on the way there. We’ll see how this card does on the long, lonely, stretch of Interstate 5 of Central California.

4 Responses to “Verizon V740 Keeps Me on the Web No Matter Where My Mac Is!”

1. azxplorer Says:
   April 27th, 2007 at 7:41

   Well, just to let you know I use the card all the time in Phoenix and it works great here.

2. Ben Says:
   April 27th, 2007 at 9:39

   Thanks azexplorer! I live in PHX too and was thinking about which carrier and card to go with for my MbPro. Thanks for the recommendation.

3. PXLated Says:
   April 27th, 2007 at 18:55

   I’ve found the speed varies greatly from location to location (Minneapolis). I get great speeds at my house, yet a mile away it drops to less than half and less than dialup in a first tier suburb. It’s almost a tower by tower situation.
   There’s tons of very fast free WiFi here if you don’t mind buying a lot of coffee. We’re not inundated with for pay Starbucks, it’s more a free Caribou or DunnBros. here. I prefer the WiFi just because it’s a lot faster so I only use EVDO for fill in.

4. Doktora Says:
   May 24th, 2007 at 6:23

   Does anyone know if it works on a Powerbook G4, or does it only work on the Pros?

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