ATT Unite Pro 4G LTE Mobile WiFi Hotspot Review. In the past couple of months we had the opportunity to travel overseas to Colombia and brought the ATT Unite Pro 4G LTE Mobile WiFi Hotspot with us for roaming internet access while traveling around the country. The overall experience with the ATT Unite Pro is excellent. Great signal, great battery life and super convenient to carry with you everywhere you go.
While roaming the Unite Pro will borrow bandwidth from the local internet providers, which was Claro and Movistar in our travels around Colombia and were hard pressed to notice many locations, urban or rural that we were not able to receive signal where there wasn’t already an existing network.
Hardware Specifications
The Unite Pro is made for AT&T by Netgear and works quite well in our experience. The Unite Pro boasts Dual-Band WiFi broadcasting 5GHz and 2.4GHz frequencies for convenient and optimal speed while your moving about. It supports 802.11 a/b/g/n WiFi, 3G UMTS 850/1900/2100MHz and 4G LTE protocols.
The capacitive touchscreen measures 2.4 inches and displays 240×320 resolution with 64k colors. Under the hood we find a Qualcomm® MDM9225 and WTR1605L CPU and chipset and 512MB of RAM powered by a 4020 mAh battery which gives excellent return on battery life. Physically the ATT Unite Pro measures 4.41×2.68×0.75 and weighs 5.82 ounces. It comes with a Micro-USB to USB plug with a 2.1A AC wall plug.
There isn’t much to it, a power button, status LED light, Capacitive Home and Back buttons, micro-USB port and two external antenna ports with slide covers at the bottom which the average person will never use.
Setup
Setup is virtually plug and play, the SIM card slot resides underneath the battery. Simply remove the back cover, lift out the battery, slide in the SIM card to the peculiar slot. I never quite seen a SIM slot like this one, the slot bows down into the recession while a metal band keeps it under pressure with the contact points. No spring loaded SIM card slot, but luckily you won’t be swapping out SIM cards very often.
Once you’ve added the SIM card, boot up the device and about 30 seconds to initialize, gain signal and your off and running. The welcome screen by default displays the WiFi password so you don’t have to go fumbling for it. On the flipside, you can hide it under the welcome screen so that you don’t get curious eyes looking and lifting your WiFi password.
The Unite Pro 4G LTE hotspot can handle up to 15 simultaneous connections from various WiFi devices and even has a guest WiFi feature if your feeling nice and want to share a slice of bandwidth. Additionally you can even block out some devices if you are experiencing any type of lag from network congestion or someone abusing the bandwidth. You also have the option of running Dual-Band WiFi; 5GHz and 2.4GHz if your device supports it and you can also balance the amount of total connected devices to each network band via a simple slider.
Sharing Power and Battery Life
The unit also has the ability to share it’s power with your mobile device should you find yourself running short while traveling about and comes with a 3 inch Micro-USB to Female USB plug so you can easily plug your iOS or Android device to the Unite Pro. You can even set a 30/60/90 minute boost session so that you don’t deplete your Unite Pro; a 15 second timer lets you know how much time in your boost session is left.
Battery life is excellent. On a full charge we are able to sustain usage throughout the day and evening with energy left to spare. If you find you are running low, you can set the unit to use standard WiFi range vs extended WiFi range, decrease your screen timeout will save you some charge.
Usage Experience
You have the option to set the Standby time from 30 min to 15 min or 5 min of inactivity before the unit goes idle. We suggest you use the 15 min interval as it was able to consistently give connection without issue while maintaining battery life throughout the entire day and evening. At the 5 min time out interval, we began to experience DNS issues which are the result of losing connection while idle and then having issues reconnecting at which point your easiest option is to clear your browsers cache and reboot your end device and/or the Unite Pro which can be a bit annoying. You also have the option to tether the device to your PC or laptop to utilize and charge simultaneously; supports Win 7, XP, Vista, Mac, Win8 X86.
The User Interface is very easy and a pleasure to operate. The service is reliable and quick. It easily fit inside our jacket pocket and mostly never took it out of the backpack when traveling from location to location. On location testing outside the US in various regions of Colombia; from Bogota to Cartegena and various parts of the country, we had 3 iPhones and 1 Android and 2 Android Tablets connected and did experience some congestion from time to time where we needed to bump some of the devices to our block list.
Conclusion
If you’re a traveler for business or leisure, the ATT Unite Pro 4G LTE Mobile WiFi Hotspot is a nice little friend to have along with you for the ride. The Unite Pro is small, fits in your pocket and once you turn it on, there’s minimal need to even look at it throughout your travels. The service is reliable and very handy for when your in transit or staying in places where you might not have the best speeds or internet access at all.
ATT Unite Pro 4G LTE Mobile WiFi Hotspot is available currently for only $49 (normally $199.99) with a qualified 2 year plan. A monthly charge of $50.00 will grab you 5GB of data with $10.00 extra per every 1GB over 5 you use in a month. You can also add in international roaming packages as you would your normal phone.
ATT Unite Pro 4G LTE Mobile WiFi Hotspot
