Quick Hands-On With The Sprint Overdrive 3G/4G Hotspot

@grg / 9:59 pm PST • January 6, 2010

Look out, MiFi – Sprint just pushed out your new baby brother, and he looks like a mean one.

The Sprint Overdrive is a mobile hotspot, not unlike the aforementioned MiFi. The idea is simple: turn it on, and you’ve got a WiFi access point pulling down data via Sprint’s third and fourth generation networks.

We just got our hands on the device for the first time, and while it’ll still be a few days before we’ve given it a rough enough run-through for a full review, we’ve got some first impressions to share.

What we like:

It booted up quick (about 15 seconds), and connected instantly.
It picked up a 4G signal, even in the middle of this thick-walled Vegas casino.
Built in GPS receiver
The speeds seem pretty dang good at first glance. We’re pulling down pages considerably faster on the Overdrive than we are on the 3G-only Verizon MiFi, though that’s still only about 1 megabit per second. This thing should be pulling down speeds a good amount faster than that, but we are in the middle of a casino during the middle of a cell-phone-packed trade show. We’ll run formal tests tomorrow when I’m in a more standard test environment. I expect it to be perform quite a bit better.
The WEP key shows on the device’s built in screen, so there’s no need to write it down and tape it to the back.

What we don’t:

Holy crap fingerprints. The Overdrive is made of a very shiny black plastic, which looks great – until you touch it. I’d gladly take a simpler texture if it meant I didn’t have to give this thing a soft cloth rub-down ever 20 seconds.

That’s all for now, folks – check back in a few days, I’m sure we’ll have more to say.