Re: HSDPA Thinkpad X60s - will it do GPRS/3G?

On Fri, 06 Apr 2007 07:28:14 +0100, Peter
<occassionally-confused@nospam.co.uk> wrote:

>
>The IBM/Lenovo laptop ThinkPad X60s 1704 lists as having HSDPA. This
>appears to be a superset of 3G.
>
>Does this mean that it will also work on 3G and GPRS? If not, what is
>the point of this feature, in Europe?
>

Yes, it drops back as necessary.

>The other thing is that Insight are bundling this laptop with the
>Vodafone GPRS/3G PCMCIA card. What is the point?
>
I can't see any, although I suppose you may have a greater choice of
tariffs.

>Insight list the sim card tarriff as £2/MB (if going for the zero
>monthly payment option) which is considerably lower than the previous
>datacard offerings which were (on the vodafone mobile connect card)
>£3.06/MB (£7.50/MB when roaming). But Insight give a link to the Voda
>website where these figures don't appear at all, giving instead
>£10.50/MB which is a ridiculous rate.
>

The only tariff I seemed able to get for the HSDPA device was the
Lenovo ESIM 250, which gives (I think) 250MB/month for £25/vat. This
is for a 12-month contract. I cancelled early as I had a reduced need
for the service and in any case had never managed to make it stay up
for more than about 5 minutes. That may , though, have been due to a
hardware problem. I had no real incentive to determine where the
problem lay.

>I am looking for a lightweight ~ 12" laptop which has wifi and gprs/3g
>built in and has a ~6hr battery life. There aren't many about.

I'd try to find others who've used the Sierra/Vodafone combination
that the X60s includes, and see how thye've fared. Apart from my
difficulties with Vodafone I'm very happy with my Thinkpad.