I have been doing some tests on the three Hughes phones the company offers; the 7100, SO-2510, SG-2520.
The old 7100 works OK for dial-up (does not support GPRS) and has a decent battery life. Dial up data rate ~ 1.3kbytes/sec.
The SO- gives only half the data rate of the 7100, which is bizzare. GPRS works only every 5th or 10th connection and packs up within minutes.
The SG- works on dial-up similarly to the 7100 but a bit slower (about
1.1 kbytes/sec) and GPRS does not work at all. It also has a really stupid bug: doing a Disconnect on the PC does not disconnect the call
- you have to do it manually on the phone's keypad. It seems to ignore both DTR dropping and the ~~~+++~~~ method. The bluetooth connection works OK; curiously the FAX mode is 10-20% faster on dial-up data than the DUN mode... But the battery life, when not making a call but anytime bluetooth is communicating, is only about 2 hours.
These products seem only half finished, and the duff GPRS service (for which Thuraya charge a lot extra per month if you are on contract) is a puzzle. Why would anybody launch a $X BN satellite without first testing it works?
Their tech support is nonexistent - recruited from the Vodafone PAYG Team no doubt ;)
If anybody has solved the hangup problem in particular, I would be very interested. Their OEM modules can hardly be this crappy; they would be useless.
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