Word: merlin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Novatel, whose Minstrel line of wireless modems is popular with Palm users, has just begun shipping the Merlin, which works on most PC laptops, to retail stores. The company says that at $279, it is the cheapest wireless modem around (I haven't found a cheaper one--others tend to cost $400 and up). Another plus: the Merlin draws roughly one tenth the power of a typical laptop modem. That's good news for road warriors and anyone else trying to conserve their laptop's battery...
...Merlin connects to the Net using Cellular Digital Packet Data (also known as CDPD, which is my favorite abbreviation to say, since it sounds like Seedy Petey). Unfortunately, Seedy Petey is not my favorite service to use. You can get it in most metropolitan areas from cellular carriers such as AT&T. But, unlike cellular-phone service, which is billed by the minute, you pay by the bit: it costs around $15 a month to send 500 MB of data; unlimited service is available for $54 a month. That would be reasonable if it always worked. But it doesn...
...sends data over constantly changing unused frequencies in the cellular network, a juggling act that succeeds when the user is at rest. Indeed, when I was sitting at my desk 23 floors above the streets of Manhattan, the connection was just fine: data moved easily to and from the Merlin, and even Web pages could be loaded within a reasonable amount of time. But when I was not at rest--when I was, in fact, hauling along on an eastbound train--two tin cans and a string would have made a tighter connection. I found it all but useless...
...still in its infancy. Even with its problems, I can see how this modem might be perfect for certain users. I loved the feeling of simply turning on my laptop, shoving in the modem and being online without having to wait for a dial tone. (The Merlin is "hot swappable," which means you don't have to reboot your machine to use it.) If I were always on the road, traveling among big cities, it would be terrific never again to have to reconfigure my laptop's dial-up connections. It's also swell to be able...
...doesn't take much to imagine how soon the rest of us will be untethered from our modem wires. Novatel is already talking about its next-generation modem, which will abandon Seedy Petey for gsm, a cellular standard that handles data far better--and faster. That GSM-compatible Merlin, which the company expects to start selling in the middle of next year, will supposedly send and receive data at Mercury-fast 144 kbps, even from a train. I bet it'll be cute...