Touchpads operate in one of several ways, including capacitive sensing and conductance sensing. The Touchpad could be absolutely used as a living room/kitchen device, but with the warmer weather arriving, you might be a bit jealous of 3G functions, seeing newly minted Touchpad 3G owners soaking up the sun in their local parks and coffee shops while tapping, swiping, and pinching away.
The typical solution for getting 3G signals is to own a Wi-Fi device, such as 3G USB key. But Touchpad lacks a USB port to install the required software, so
ZTE MF60 Mobile Hotspot that we’ve talked about several times before is needed urgently. A portable wireless router could take the 3G signal from the Wi-Fi signal that it receives and broadcasts.
ZTE MF60 Wi-Fi hotspot is a 3.5G mobile hotspot device. We can connect it via USB or Wi-Fi interface. With HSDPA 21Mbps downlink, quad-band GSM and tri-band UMTS, it gives maximum 8 users with super fastest internet experience all over the world at the same time.
Hooking the ZTE MF60 to our non-3G Touchpad is very easy. We power on the MF60, and its signal was immediately recognized by the Touchpad, and listed in the Network Settings submenu, along with all the other Wi-Fi signals in the area.
Just like a regular wireless router, you can access the control panel from the connected device, but for the most part, our experience could be regarded as “set-it-and-forget-it”, which means the connecting process is very easy.
One big advantage of using ZTE MF60 as opposed to Touchpad 3G is that we are able to avoid any of the streaming-video content restrictions reported by Touchpad 3G users.
ZTE MF60 is fine for Web surfing and even video streaming, but not as fast as our normal 802.11b home Wi-Fi connection. Here in New York, both residential cable modem speeds and 3G speeds are notoriously dodgy, and your mileage may vary greatly.
That may be double what the Touchpad 3G’s plan costs, and the Touchpad plans offer the additional benefit of not requiring a contract, but the real advantage of the
ZTE MF60 3G Router is that it can be used with a variety of other devices (up to five at a time), including laptops, Netbooks, and even the iPod Touch.
