Customer Reviews

SPECTEC SDIO Wireless LAN Networking Card WLAN 802.11b, Internet Connection for PDAs, Notebooks and PCs

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I recently purchased this card and was a little concerned as my PDA was not on the list of compatible devices. (Viewsonic V36) I had read some reviews on other sites that basically gave me the impression that it either worked or didn't. Fortunately for me I just plugged it in the slot, installed the driver via Active Sync and was ready to go.

I have had no problems over the first week of use. I am running PPC 2003 and everything works perfectly. The only thing that I wish they included were some programs for using it. But there are plenty of apps available on the net.

Signal strength has been good everywhere that I have used it although I haven't really had a chance to check to see what the range is. Most reviewers have stated 70 feet which seems pretty fair to me. In my home I have two walls between my front room and the access point and transmission was always in the 70-80% range at about 30 feet. Up at the office I have picked up an access point on the floor above me. So I can't fault performance in that area.

Battery usage is fair, I can get about 1 1/2 hours with constant use on a full charge. That is compared to about 2 1/2 without it. But when I am using the card I tend to run a few more apps at the same time so that may account for the reduction in battery life.

Overall an excellent product. I does not ship for the US but is shipped from Taiwan. Again, not a problem. I had mine within two weeks and that includes a holiday. If you are looking for a wireless card for your pda this will definitely fill the bill. Make sure that you do meet all of the OS requirements and that your slot is SDIO not just SD.

I paid over $100 for a San Disk SD card for my iPaq 2200, and it NEVER worked right. This card was $35, and worked great from first plug-in. Faster, too.

The Spectec SDIO card is simply superb. I have sprint palm treo 700wx, and i had used their data plan for $25/month...I always thought that this is too much, so I bought this WIFI card for the first time for $33 (with shipping).. from BUYGPSNOW.. they sell the cheapest and the best card out there...
I got the installation cd..provided by the seller, i installed it, and i was good to go. The battery usage is the same as if I had used the EVDO technology from sprint.. I believe SPECTEC consumes the least energy, is the most reliable, cheapest WIFI card... and yeah.. also the smallest.. just a little bit longer than my sandisk sd memory card...

I recently obtained a Dell Axim X5 PDA and was informed that this wifi card is compatible. When I installed the driver, I received an error message saying my unit (Dell Axim X5) is not compatible.

Item worked for around one month then died. I paid s&h to send it back expecting a replacement OR REPAIR. they sent me back the same defective dead unit and after multiple emails (they kept asking technical questions in broken written English) they refused to replace it for a new one while it was still under "warranty".
DO NOT BUY THIS ITEM

i have a mio a701 with win mobile5, works like a charm, easily installed, picks up the signal pretty well. of course, given the size of the internal antenna it's not as powerful as a laptop wifi card but hey it's to be expected. overall it's a good working card, the only negative part about it i found was - it sticks out a bit but then again all of them do and this one does the least

I have had this card in my PDA now for about two weeks. Installation was straight forward and card does work as advertised. I am using is with an IPAQ 1940 running v4.2 of pocket PC.

The Good:
-installation was simple
-card recognized with no problem
-it has expected range for something so small - and in general I think the range is very good
-works everywhere I have tried - my home network, public hotspots, etc.

The Not So Good:
-using activesync can be hit and miss - sometimes when I plug in it works and sometimes I need to eject the WAN card and reboot the IPAQ - I can't say I have spent too much time getting to the bottom of this and the workaround is not too much trouble
-I do find myself resetting the IPAQ more often then before the card, but this is not because the system has crashed but because it has stopped recognizing the WAN card - again, I have not spent much time troubleshooting this and I do not find it that much of a problem, just a little inconvenient

My final thoughts on this are that it works great, it's not perfect, but I paid about $20 for it and it was way cheaper than buying a new IPAQ with built in wireless networking.

Easy to install & allowed me to surf the Internet with my PDA. I have a Garmin GPS iQUE M5. No problems encountered.

Got this for the Palm Treo 700w and it works fine. There was a small learning curve on how to use it but it works great now!

I figured this $35 card was worth the price if it turned my 5+ year old HP IPAQ 1940 PDA into a free wireless device. The SDIO interface worked perfectly and the software installed on my Windows Mobile 2003 device without error. It found my WEP secured home wireless signal and quickly connected after I entered the security code. It has also functioned well around town at various coffee houses with unsecured wireless. The biggest challenge was that I had to do a bit of fiddling around to install a decent web browser (Opera 4.2) on it since the old IE was pretty outdated. Various web sites helped me in this regard. Overall, this card did exactly what I wanted it to do.