Broadband Speed Checker

You may have seen that last year I carried out a speed test for internet connections via a Nokia E51 and a Huawei 530 dongle from T Mobile.  I've just carried out another speed test between a Nokia E75 and a Huawei E160 dongle also from T Mobile.  The tests were carried out within 10 minutes of each other around midday today (Sunday).

This time upon connecting the Nokia to the laptop a different option appears on the phones screen, previously Nokia's would ask you if you wanted to connect in "PC Suite Mode", "Mass Storage Mode" etc etc, this time "Connect PC to Internet" appeared.  I selected that and a little screen popped up on the laptop asking to install a small piece of software to control the connection. As you can see below its a pretty unobtrusive piece of software and tells you how much data has passed through your connection. It automatically detects your service provider and sets its self up for use.

So to the tests...
With the dongle the following speeds were achieved

with the Nokia E75 the following speeds were achieved

the dongle still wins although the E75 performs a lot better than the E51 did.

Dell Streak charger 2...

Well, after adapting a fag lighter USB charger, I decided that I'd make something up that I could use with any existing USB charging ports that I had.

I found an old USB extension lead and cut it in half, then soldered the white and green wires together and reattached, and then reattached the black to black, and red to red, then finished it all off with trusty insulation tape.

Its not the neatest thing in the world.. but it sure beats forking out £25 for another charger from Dell.

Dell Streak car charger!

I recently did a crazy thing and took out a 24 month mobile phone contract with O2 in order to get my hands on the Dell Streak... I'm glad I did as its a very very funky phone. I will go into more detail on the handset at some point on here. The only things that have really annoyed me about the phone is the poor battery life, think of your charging lead as an ambilical cord and you're getting pretty close, and the deliberate method of stopping you from using already existing methods of charger to get the thing going.

It'll trickle charge from a computers USB port, which as far as I'm aware gives less that 1amp however, it will not charge from any other USB power port I had (ones that had been used to charge mobile phones, GPS devices etc.. No fag lighter USB charger would work either.. I bought a couple of 2amp chargers and neither did the trick..then I came across the following article which explained all.  To cut a long story short, you need to bust open your USB charger, (the bit you insert into the fag lighter socket) and carefully solder a joint between the middle 2 USB pins (there are 4, the middle two aren't used). I've done it and it works perfectly!

Which means... Dell have deliberately designed their phone not to charge off any other USB charging device. How very grown up and to top it off the rip off merchants wanted to charge you £50 for the privellage of using their own car charger...

Its a shame that such a nice device has such a murky background.