Mobile broadband has been one of the shiny stars of the tech world in recent years, bringing effective, usable internet access to businesses and consumers. Its influence is such that that the word ‘dongle’ is now part and parcel of many people’s working lives.

However, while a regular USB dongle is a great tool for getting online, it’s a rather insular experience. While a router can share an internet connection with many users, a dongle is only helpful to one user – at least up till now.

The Mifi 2532 is designed to solve that problem. It’s essentially a USB dongle, but with Wi-Fi built-in, enabling you to connect up to five different devices to the unit. The Mifi also has an SD card slot built in, enabling you to store, and in turn share, files, like a miniature portable NAS. It’s been available in the US for CDMA networks, but now a European version supporting UMTS and HSPA has arrived and can be purchased from Expansys for just over £200 including VAT. In theory it offers 7.2Mbps download and 5.76Mbps upload, though of course, those are just theoretical maximums.

In the UK, 3 has already announced that it will be offering a branded device in time for Christmas. It hasn’t revealed pricing but one would expect it to come as part of a bundle. We also envision that other networks will follow suit with similar deals.

The device could play a key role in a number of scenarios. In the home, it could be handy for connecting MP3 players, laptops and netbooks to the device. In business, it could prove useful for small teams working together, or indeed for giving presentations to clients, enabling you to get online for that crucial demo, without having to rely on the venue’s connections.

You could create a temporary hotspot, and share those presentation files without having to fiddle about with paper or USB sticks. Alternatively, it could be a great way of avoiding Wi-Fi hotspot charges, or simply as a back-up internet access device.

In our tests, the Mifi proved extremely easy to get going. It’s a small device - around the size of a bar of soap - and has no antenna or other protuberances. It’s a smart little box, with a black gloss casing on top and a silver edging running round the sides, extending over the top to include the power button.

It weighs a mere 81g making it easy to pack and forget. A matt black finish underneath houses a 1,530mAh battery, which is rated as providing 40 hours of standby and up to four hours of continuous use, though that will depend on how many devices you have connected and how hard it has to work to get a network signal.

A separate charger is included in the box, (with a USB micro, rather than USB mini connector) and it can be plugged into a notebook to charge. However, if you do the latter, the device acts as a regular USB modem, but deactivates the Wi-Fi, so the connection can no longer be shared.

Initial set-up involves just popping in a SIM (we used a pre-pay O2 SIM) and turning on the device. The power light flashes a different colour depending on the quality of the connection, Green for GPRS or EDGE, blue for 3G, and violet for HSPA, and even in our office, we were able to get the latter. A small Wi-Fi indicator on the side lights up when Wi-Fi is being broadcasted.

We were immediately able to see the Mifi as a Wi-Fi hotspot on an iPhone, and connect to it without fuss. Range proved to be excellent, and even moving down three floors in our building, we were still able to stay connected and browse using the device.

We then followed up by connecting a Windows Mobile smartphone and a netbook, and had no problems connecting, though we immediately noticed that the connection speeds drop noticeably as three devices connected at once. It's not really suitable for five devices accessing the internet at once, but more for enabling several devices to gain access frequently and easily when they need it.

Our thoughts then turned to security, something Novatel has clearly considered. The Mifi can be set up like a regular router and by going to “http://www.mifi”, you can login to a clean and neat web interface (default password is ‘admin’). From there you can set up WEP, WPA or WPA2 protected access.

The login also gives you information about your router such as IP address, subnet mask, and connected clients. You can also setup Port filtering, and Port forwarding for services such as DNS, FTP, HTTP, POP3, and Telnet.

A power management feature lets you determine just how long to wait before the Mifi powers down when idle and using battery resources. You can set this to between two minutes and 60, or indeed never.

Users can also set up profiles, so that if you want to swap SIM card, say if you’re travelling, you can do so and not have to enter all your set up info again.

Once you’ve set everything up as you want it, you can then backup your configuration files to a computer, so you can restore them should you have to.

No drivers are required to get the Mifi working wirelessly, and even when plugged directly into a laptop via the USB the drivers are installed automatically. The Novatel wireless software is clearly laid out, showing signal strength, time connected and data throughput. Further options are also available from a button at the top left.

Plugged into the PC copying files to and from the device was a breeze, though speeds where rather on the slow side. The NAS files feature is available only from the web interface, and files on the SD card can’t be made into a Windows drive letter, which makes it somewhat awkward to use. However, as an occasional feature, it’s a good one to have.

The Mifi is easy to set up and use and works well, but it does get rather hot to use, so you won’t want to keep it in a shirt pocket. It also could do with a clear battery indicator on the device itself – the web interface does show how much battery is left, and the indicator light flashes red when it’s running low, but it could be clearer still.

As a stand-alone unit the Mifi is on the expensive side, but if you’ve got a specific use case scenario it could help with, it will certainly make for a worthwhile investment. If you like the idea, but don’t want to lay out the cash, it might be worth waiting until carriers start offering these on a discount plans later this year.

Author: Benny Har-Even

Novatel Mifi 2532 Mobile Wi-Fi hotspot review