Uni-Fi Portable Roaming Free Wi-Fi Hotspot

This product appears to fill a gap in the market for those who seek an alternative to paying excessive roaming charges when travelling either with their own home sim or buying a local sim card. But it comes with very serious health warnings.First , any attempted contact with the supplier is a disaster.Although the supplier is based in Ireland where some degree of efficiency might be expected no phone number is advertised,broken promises of a call back are given out, email responses to queries are proferred but arrive days later by unidentified nameless individuals feigning apologetic concern. Next the website and the printed instructions in the pack containing the item are woefully inadequate.The item works in only a few non UK countries and it is not possible to know that for sure until the applicable app is loaded eg on a phone or tablet.The app is therefore not available anywhere else but that basic fact is invisible on the website and in the instructions.The latter are third rate typical of the almost impenetrable language of cheap electronic kits pumped out by new third world and/or emerging countries.Why on earth not only Amazon but also bizarrely British Airways in their Hi Life Shop are touting this very expensive and problematic anonymous toy is the real mysteryNext signing up and on when the app is eventually located is not straightfowardAt the time of writing this review it remains to be seen how economical the item really is vis a vis eg a local data card eg the O2 data fixed price card obtainable in the UK which fits in a huawei mobile device.Experts with a wit beyond that of this reviewer should really tackle and carefully study whether the vast amounts of prepaid financial packages listed in the signing up process represent real value.At present it is not clear whether and if so how one can easily check on consumption on line eg as in case of the O2 huawei gizmo.Enough already.We live in an age where great technological wonders are brandished with enormous promises but where the irritation and waste of time induced eventually cause the poor little customer to ask himself why did I bother? This a classic example

I bought this on a flight from Heathrow to New York. The £99 British Airways deal included 500MB of worldwide data.On arrival at JFK, I quickly connected to free wifi to download the app and register the device. Before I could finish my coffee, three of us were happily connected to the Internet. There is a 3 or 4 minute delay when you turn the device on in each country and about a minutes delay for subsequent power ups.The three of us use iPhones and it's important to note that (as far as I'm aware) you cannot get the iPhone to treat a connection to this units wifi as if it were a hotspot. That means all the syncing of photos, updating of apps etc that occur when you're happily connected to your home network will occur when you connect to this device - unless you temporarily turn off those features.Consequently, initial data use was high. 250MB was used across the three phones in the 1 hour taxi journey to our appartment. However, that was after 10 hours of no wifi so, loads of apps to update etc, plus two trigger happy girls photographing everything on the journey and immediately posting to Facebook and whatsapping the same pictures between each other - doh!!!!Speeds were very good on the device. Most of the time there was no noticeable lag when browsing google maps or checking Facebook etc. Even though this is a 3G device, it seems New York's 3G network is built to cope with the number of people using it. Unlike parts of central London, where Internet speeds are often so slow they are unusable.After connecting to the appartment's wifi, data usage on this device was much more reasonable. During the course of our 11 days, I bought a 1GB data package for €29.90 (roughly £25 after the banks line their wallets with foreign currency charges). That package lasted us until our return - though only about 40MB remained.During the 8 hour flight home, the battery pack side of things kept two iPhones at 100% and on arrival, kept my phone at 100% for the 6 hour additional journey I had. Even after this, the device reported that it still had over 50% of charge remaining.I'm a frequent traveller and while I could save a little money swapping to local SIM cards, the beauty of this device is that I don't have to. I don't have to change my phone number every time I visit a new country and I don't have to buy bolt-ons/traveller plans from my phone company. Plus, I have a useful portable battery pack.