Best EVDO Card for Mac PowerBooks?

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: PC / Laptop, Peripherals, Wireless / WiFi

Om Malik has given a bit of advice to those looking for some EVDO love on their PowerBooks:

If you are looking for a EVDO card for Powerbook, I will recommend, Sierra Wireless Aircard 580, which after some hacking gives you better performance than any other PC card. However, it doesn’t work as well with Windows Laptops. It was giving me about 350 kbps on Mac and 115 kbps on a PC laptop. Novatel’s Merlin v620, however is a solid and brisk performer on Windows Machines, with average speed of about 270 kbps. It got 115-120 kbps on a Mac. The comparisons were carried out using Powerbook 15 (Tiger) and Averatec 1000. I sat in the same location for the two laptops, and repeated this experiment in four different spots in San Francisco. I look forward to your feedback from other cities. Kyocera 650 is known to work well with a Mac. Folks over at EVDOinfo.com have more details. These recommendations are only for Verizon’s EVDO service only.

Mike from EVDOinfo.com chimes in:

Did you run your tests more than once? We have found the KPC650 to be the best performer out of the 5 EVDO cards that are currently available. The KPC650 is the only card that Verizon supports on Macs, although, at http://www.EVDOinfo.com, you will find directions to get ALL cards working with PowerBooks for Verizon or Sprint.

Anyone out there have any personal recommendations, or horror stories?

(Thanks Doug!)

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