Old man is looking for something that he can use mobile broadband on to trade shares at work. It will only be for internet, nothing more.

Also, I have no idea about mobile broadband, never seen it, never used it. Is it fast enough/reliable enough and SAFE enough to do internet banking and trade shares?

All I know about are those E-PC things for like $500, but I haven't looked much into them...

eeePC are sub 400 not ~500.

For around 500 you get a "real" acer notebook.

We just got some eee901s here at work, to trial for students. I think I'll be handing my Toshiba Sat Pro with huge screen and no battery life for one of these.

Is it fast enough/reliable enough and SAFE enough to do internet banking and trade shares?

Unless there are some exploits I'm unaware of, the point of SSL and stuff is to be able to do stuff safely over an insecure connection. I've done my banking over mobile broadband lots of times. In terms of stability, mobile BB was stable enough to play TF2 over, though I was within 1km of the tower.

If you're not in a good coverage zone or are a few km away from the tower, expect dropouts, etc.

eeepcs are real small, frustratingly small

id probably go one of those cheap acers for around $500

I'm having a look at these Acers now, $599, XP, warranty... seems good.

So whats the best deal with mobile broadband? What ISP do you guys use? I assume you just get a little USB modem or something?

If you need something reliable and with great coverage, the big companies would be the way to go (Telstra, Optus, etc) - but you don't get the most bang for the buck and you'll usually be locked into a loooong contract (no surprise there).

I went with Chilli which basically resells iBurst. Paid $130 to not be in a contract (better than paying $YY/month x remaining months if you want to leave), plans were relatively good.

One thing to look into is what happens if you go over your cap. Something like $30 for 3GB might sound great, until you find out it's $150/GB if you go over since there is no protective shaping. Or even $1500/GB (not a typo) if your modem wanders to another network even if you're not capped. I think I was turned off a few ISPs (especially '3') when I was browsing for plans due to this issue, though I think the modems are now configured to not wander by default.

And yeah the USB modems seem to be popular. They used to be the size of a wallet, but now are usually dongle sized.

last edited by parabol at 09:09:11 25/Sep/08

teehee, dongle

Hi Chub. I just bought my son one of the nifty little ACER Aspire one laptops with one gig of ram ect. Seems to work really well. Its got more grunt than I thought it would have. Ie, will play Quake 3 no prob (not that your dad is looking to do that)

They are $598 at Office works ATM and you get $99 back from ACER (if bought before the end of this month I think)

EDIT: Youtube vid of Quake3 on aspire one.





last edited by E.T. at 11:34:24 25/Sep/08