It is quite disappointing that I have already gone for a few trips to the service center since buying my Alcatel Y800 pocket LTE wifi from Smart last month. I’m just glad that the service center delivers fast turnaround, which ended up in having to change the entire motherboard. Since I was having some troubles with my first pocket LTE device, I decided to buy another pocket wifi, this time from Huawei.
I checked out Cyberzone in Megamall for a good pocket wifi alternative and found Huawei promoting their line of openline pocket wifi. This Huawei E5372 initially got my attention with its dual antenna feature to help boost your wifi signal. While E5372 is priced locally at Php5,500.00–which, by the way, I find too expensive and being openline is not a good reason for being 2 grand more expensive, I got an E5375 straight from China instead. See how similar they look?
According to my sister, who previously worked at Globe Telco, they have used E5375 as their demo unit and it works just the same. Imagine, I got my E5375 for only CNY 547.00 (that’s about Php3,500.00)… not bad at all!
My Huawei E5375 works as soon as you pop the simcard inside. What I like about this device is you’d automatically have a nominated password as soon as you place your LTE capable sim. Then you can just personalize or modify your wifi name and password later on. With Alcatel’s Y800, your internet is free for all until you access the menu and set-up your password using your PC or smartphone.
Aesthetically, I like Alcatel Y800 better. The body is rubber coated, giving it a more sophisticated feel. But, of course, this rubber coating is easily scratched with the keys inside your bag making the nicks obvious. My Huawei E5375 is also guilty of being obvious in imperfections. I find myself rubbing it with alcohol every night just to keep it looking new and pretty.
Huawei’s pocket LTE comes with one 1780mah battery, versus Alcatel Y800’s two 1500mah batteries. But I don’t normally switch up batteries since I charge them directly with my powerbank when I’m out. So the extra battery is not really useful for me. Both Alcatel Y800 and Huawei E5375 comes with a USB cord and a 1000mah travel charger.
Performance wise, I was really impressed when my Huawei E5375 gave me 28mbps, to which my Alcatel Y800 can only provide 14-18mbps at its best. I’m not sure if the locally available device Alcatel Y800 has some settings in it to suppress the speed or I was just lucky when I used my Huawei and got that much speed.
The only thing that turns me off about Huawei E5375 is that it easily overheats. But I find it rather cute that it gives a warning first before actually shutting down automatically. Oh, and my Alcatel Y800 also shuts down when it becomes too hot… Although I find it more heat resistant than my Huawei device.
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