Dell's new laptops to hop on Verizon EV-DO?
By Ryan Block 
posted Sep 19th 2005 9:05AM
posted Sep 19th 2005 9:05AM
It's not all too often Dell gets to turn up the old buzz machine, but apparently they're expected to make an announcement with Verizon Wireless that new Dell Latitudes will feature the option of getting integrated EV-DO service. Not a huge surprise (especially after the Vaio T350), but hopefully this will be a mini-PCI solution, and not something built-in like the Sony. And yes, either way we'll be hearing a whole lot about this in the coming year, especially as Cingular and Sprint roll out their high speed data services.
Very smart on the part of Dell and VZW.
VZW's EVDO network right now is the only truly viable 3G network available in the states. Sprint's rolling out EVDO, but way behind VZW at this point, and who knows when Cingular will get its UMTS network up and running.
This makes the Dell laptops so much better than the Sony's in that EVDO blows away Cingular's EDGE network.
Agree, that Verizon is the way to go. It will be interesting to see if there is an external antenna option, which is used for booster antennas OR signal amplifiers, which you may need in a weaker signal area. Also, with the soon shipping Kyocera KR1 Router, it may be more attractive to have a PC Card, as you can easily move your PC card to support your home network, mobile hotspot, or small work group.
To me it makes more sense to have an EVDO cell phone with bluetooth and have all of your devices use bluetooth's DUN. This way you won't be stuck with 2 bills for multiple laptops, pocketpc's and you can use a buddy's laptop with your phone. If they made something like a SIM chip for EVDO so you could pop it back and forth from device to device that would be cool too.
The announcement has been made:
http://news.vzw.com/news/2005/09/pr2005-09-19b.html
It would make more sense to be able to use bluetooth to connect to the laptop, except that verizon disables bluetooth every chance they get so that it only works with headsets. so unless you hack your treo.....
Bluetooth is not fast enough to handle EVDO. If you use Bluetooth via EVDO, the maximum speed you will get is around 143K, even if you are in a 400K - 700K (or faster), area. BlueTooth 2.0 should have the bandwidth to handle EVDO.
#5 - I'm writing this tethered to an e815 over Bluetooth. I just ran two different bandwidth tests and between the two I got an average of 400.5 kbps.