Pantech PX-500
Score: 75% Worth: $1 - $200

One of the first connection cards to support Sprint's high-speed EV-DO Rev. A network, is it fast enough for your on-the-go life, or does it move at a snail's pace?

Setup - Very Good

Setting up the Pantech PX-500 Type II PCMCIA card on our Dell laptop (Latitude D420) was very easy; even the shakiest tech-neophyte could handle it. We simply installed the Sprint Connection Manager software, inserted the card and clicked the "Go" button. Once everything was installed, reconnecting was a simple matter of firing up the Connection Manager and clicking “Go” again -- nice, though we wish the app would connect automatically when you insert the card. For the most part, connections were successful on our first attempt, but there were a few occasions during our tests in New York when we had to try several times before a connection was established. The biggest headache the card gave us was in Las Vegas, covering CES 2007, when our laptop went into standby mode. Our connection was lost and could not be reestablished until we restarted the computer. Fortunately, the problem didn't reoccur on subsequent hibernations.

Signal - Very Good

Signal on the PX-500 was nice and strong and rarely dipped below three bars during our tests in New York, New Jersey and Las Vegas. Reception on the mobile broadband card was often stronger than on our Samsung SPH-M500 and our Samsung MM-A900, which both run on Sprint's EV-DO network. During our testing, we took the PX-500 with us on our commute from the North Jersey suburbs to New York, and found that traveling on the turnpike and through the Lincoln Tunnel didn't disrupt our signal; it remained consistent throughout our bus ride.

Speed - Good

While the PX-500 doesn't offer the same speed that we get from the wired broadband connection in our office, we were impressed by the speed we saw on Sprint's EV-DO Rev. A mobile broadband network. The numbers in our tests obviously varied depending on our location, but our downloading speed averaged 745 Kbps and peaked at 884 Kbps, which exceeds Sprint's claims of 800 Kbps average. Our uploading speed was about 256 Kbps on average and topped out at 562 Kbps, which is truly impressive, especially compared to the lagging upload speeds you'd expect from EV-DO rev. 0. Though these numbers don't seem all that high compared to the 24 Mbps download speed we get on our office connection over Ethernet, the Pantech PX-500 trumps all the speed we could eke out of our Palm Treo 700p, when tested simultaneously. In practical terms, this means that it took us about four minutes and 18 seconds to download a 4MB song off of iTunes (the same song took us about eight seconds over Ethernet). To the PX-500's credit, it was able to adeptly handle YouTube videos, regular e-mail checks and standard Web browsing without any hitches