Maven Mapper's

Last week when I went to the drive in. As I'm a bit of an uber geek with technology, I took my 3G Cellular router that created a WiFi network around my car at the drive in and then did a few fun things posting Utterz up to utterz.com.

I was mostly trying to just test or prove a concept that this was possible. There were people waiting for darkness to settle over the drive in so that the movies could begin (Wall-E and Indiana Jones IV playing that night). While they were waiting, some people were tossing around footballs while other people played dominoes and the people in front of us ran their car on idle with the air condition running, which seemed so 2001 when gas prices were reasonable enough to waste gas.

Anyway, I had been looking for something to cap off my review of the NexAira 3G cellular routers that I received from PowerfulSignal back in May. I have tried the mobile router on the lake, and on the road, but I wanted something to kind of cap off my adventure. The drive in actually worked fairly well, especially as there is a massive cell tower behind the drive in, which kind of helped to illustrate the point of how the whole thing works (and probably helps the drive in owner collect some rent money from Verizon).

Now, I never really doubted that this would work. Honestly, the thing always seems to work. I like to find the things that devices are unable to do, possibly even break them (not physically, but put them in situations where they crash or something). I like to know what extreme a device can work up to.

Unfortunately, I was never really able to find a situation where the device did not work. :)

Jeremy from Utterz, has mentioned in some of his reviews of the product that when you are in the middle of the mountains or driving down the interstate that it helps to have a cellular range extender working in conjunction with this device. I haven't tried that yet myself, but I do see the logic in it and suspect that I will likely need to pick one of those up before long.

In fact, I've been planning to get out West some year and attend Burning Man in the desert. I have no idea if you can get a cellular connection in the middle of the desert, but I think it would be pretty cool if I could get an extender capable of hitting a tower somewhere closer to well somewhere so that I could do some mobile blogging from burning man in a live capacity.

Anyway, in summary this is a great little tool. If you have to be connected for your job, or have to have a connection anywhere and everywhere at a moments notice this is probably a device that is in your future.

Double that need if you commute in a carpool!

I had a fun putting the Nexaira mobile router through its paces, and wanted to thank the folks at PowerfulSignal for giving me a chance to try it out and give my opinion. I think they have a winner of device on their hands.

Its late Friday night as I write this, and I'm heading into the weekend. While I think about the connectivity potential of this device, I can't help but think about the concepts of a 'Gargoyle' as depicted in the book Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. In the book, a Gargoyle is someone that basically walks around always connected to the internet.

This device won't make a Gargoyle out of you, but will give you all the connectivity you really need. Maybe 4G will take us the rest of the way . . .