Vodafone K5150 HUAWEI 4G LTE Stick Review

Vodafone K5150 LTE stick produced by Huawei will come soon also in Germany on the market for Vodafone. In this article, we will write a few words about the technical details and introduce you to know more about this LTE surf stick. The HUAWEI K5150 is the direct successor of the popular Vodafone K5005(Huawei E398) and is technically on the absolute amount of time: With support for LTE Category 4, up to 150 megabits per second for downstream and up to 50 Mbit/s for upload speed are possible.    

HiSilicon Chipset and Frequency Bands

The Chinese manufacturer Huawei has almost exclusively a modem chipset of its own subsidiary HiSilicon for some months. No wonder the Hi6920, the company has one of the most powerful modem ever on the market – even the top chipset supplier Qualcomm, its LTE Category 4 can currently offer only his smartphone chipset MSM8974 (Snapdragon 800). As it is not surprising that the Vodafone K5150 has such HiSilicon Balong integrated 710/ Hi6920 chipset.

Based on this chipset, the Maximum LTE speed for download is at 150 Mbit/s, when working in the UMTS network, the speed via DC-HSPA+ is up to 42.2 Mbit/s. By the way, the K5150 LTE supports 800/1800/2100/2600 MHz frequency bands, and K5150 supports 3G UMTS bands on 900/2100 MHz. In addition, the HUAWEI K5150 is of course 2G EDGE and GSM backward as a fallback on board again.      

Vodafone Design and Software

Vodafone K5150 is made entirely of plastic, on the back it’s in shiny red and on the front painted in white. The USB port cannot fold, which means that the K5150 is certainly inconvenient for some users, especially since the Huawei E3276 is a technically equivalent model on the market; the rotatable USB is an attractive and user-friendly feature. Not only the hardware, the software is also fully maintained in the Vodafone-design and therefore especially suitable for use with Vodafone SIM cards. A preliminary field test in the coming weeks will be able to say more about what handling and user friendliness of the software. As a mature LTE modem, the software for the Vodafone K5150 is naturally functional on all major operating systems such as Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OS X.  

Other Features

The other technical data correspond to those expected of a current LTE Surfstick for the high-end class: an LED on the top shows in different colors the respective operating mode. There is also a slot for MicroSD memory cards to 32 gigabytes. Also two connectors for external antenna type TS-9 are on board. One port is located under the cover of the memory card slot, the other terminal has a separate cover. When using the LTE network, the connection of two antennas and a MIMO antenna is recommended due to the MIMO antenna technology would improve the connection speed.    

Price and release date  

The Vodafone K5150 should be available in the next few days in the Vodafone online shop and at other online retailers such as http://www.4gltemall.com .  As an alternative, the technically equivalent Huawei E3276 offers even same specifications; the model number is E3276s-151. So if you like HUAWEI Brand, you could take E3276 into consideration for Vodafone 4G networks.    

HUAWEI E3276 4G LTE Category 4 USB Surfstick Review

Today, we get the demo of Huawei E3276 4G LTE cat4 USB Surfstick. If we say 2012 is the beginning year of 4G LTE, 2013 should be the beginning of 4G LTE Category 4. LTE Category 4 develops from 4G LTE (also called LTE Category 3) and is more efficiency in data transmission. It could support 50% faster speed than 4G LTE Category 3 with peak download speed up to 150Mbps on FDD network. What amazing speed!  

The Huawei E3276 Cat4 LTE modem is the successor of Huawei E398 and E397, which are LTE category 3 USB modems. Huawei E3276 has been presented to public by many 4G operators all over the world. The Huawei E3276 we get is in white color, no operators’ logo. It’s in Huawei logo without original package box.

   

The total design of Huawei E3276 is very cool, in vertical direction; it looks like a burning fire. On the front of Huawei E3276, there is Huawei Logo and beside logo, there is a LED indicator to tell users the connection status.

   

Just like Huawei E398, the Huawei E3276 is also in rotatable USB design, the difference between them is the there is a cap to stuck the USB for E3276, press the button, the USB could auto eject, so it’s somewhat like the USB design of Huawei E397, but Huawei E398 doesn’t have this feature.

   

The USB could be rotated to 2D total 180 degrees. It’s a user friendly design because it will save much space when connecting this dongle to PC, and it would help to get better signal strength.  

     

On the back of Huawei E3276, there is a stick, on which, we could see the model number Huawei E3276, Certificate information and place of origin.

   

At the below side of Huawei E3276, we could see the MicroSD card slot covers by a plastic cap. Open it, we can see there is a external antenna connector with the slot. And the other connector for pigtail is at another hole.

     

Push the back over towards to the direction to USB, the back cover could be removed from the body, and then the inner part could be seen. The Module of inner part is in plastic material, there is SIM card slot in the module. Above the module, there is the model nuber, IMEI number of Huawei E3276, and the S/N number. The model number is HUAWEI E3276s-150.

 

We get the information that HUAWEI E3276s-150 support 4G LTE FDD 800/2600MHz and 3G UMTS 900/1900/2100MHz with 2G GSM qual band 850/900/1800/1900MHz backward. And it has its partner model HUAWEI E3276s-151.  

In conclusion, the design of HUAWEI E3276 is cool and we believe the LTE cat4 dongle would give reliable high speed support for the users. Next time, we will have a test report for HUAWEI E3276 in near future.