I finally got the brand new Novatel Wireless Merlin XU870 HSDPA ExpressCard, the first card supposed to work with the ExpressCard/34 port in MacBook Pro. And yes, indeed it works. But some consideration is needed so here are my experiences, for your convenience.

The card comes with a refreshingly short and good looking Quick Start Guide, only 10 pages, so I thought that it would be very easy to install everything. A CD was in the box as well, so I tossed in the CD and discovered that it was for Windows only. Have I seen that before? The fine print on the Systems Requirements page listed a web site for Mac and Linux support so I went there, downloaded an installer. It installed quickly and after that I inserted the card. After a few seconds there was a flashing red light, which means “SIM Error. SIM card may be missing or inserted incorrectly.” according to the manual. Tried a few times, making sure that the SIM card was correctly installed. Still a no go.

So I decided to try it in Windows, thinking that maybe the accompanying software would tell me more about the problem. Booted into Windows with BootCamp, installed the software which is called MobiLink, restarted and got a black screen. Nothing at all booted. Did a hard shutdown of the machine and tried to boot into Windows again. Success! When I inserted the card Windows recognized it and installed drivers. I launched the MobiLink software and stared in horror; the GUI design mimicks a cell phone and looks just awful! Who ever commissioned that? Well, maybe it matches those PC Chassis from Taiwan with blue LEDs and dragons all over them. Or these ones.

Anyhow, I was asked to enter the PIN code for the SIM card. Aha! I did, and the card stopped flashing in red and moved over to a solid blue light on its status lamp (which have no less than five colours, and four of them can be flashing or solid). Next step was to create a profile where I entered my service providers APN (Access Point Name). Saved, tried to connect and it worked like a charm. Skype got connected and in no time I was chatting with dear Erika.

So the problem was the PIN code. The software for the Mac consists of a driver and a Modem script. And since there is no place to enter your PIN, how do you continue? This is a real bummer since all SIM cards come with a PIN code (at least here in Sweden). I tried edit the modem script and changed the first wake-up AT command to “AT+CPIN=1234″ (well, I put in my own PIN of course). Tried to connect again, no success. Noticed that the network port (under Network setting) was disabled so I deleted it, removed the card, and let the mac recreate a port as I reinserted the card. Tried to connect, and this time the card started to flash in blue so at least it had accepted the PIN code. But it refused to connect. Gave up and surfed the web for hints, and found a tip that PIN codes really should be disabled to work best in a PC-card “telephone”. Put the SIM card in my phone and disabled its PIN, reinstalled in the XU870, trashed my modified modem script, deleted the network port once again, reinstalled the drivers, inserted the XU870, added the port, entered the APN, clicked “Connect” and Voilá!

If only Novatel could have said this about PIN codes, that would have saved me 45 minutes of worthless hacking. But all kind of learning is good I guess.

The XU870 is capable of HSDPA/UMTS/EDGE/GPRS with speeds up to 3.6 Mbps, and is firmware upgradable to reach even 7.2 Mbps, but my provider doesn’t such fancy speeds yet. But now I’m connected, and can connect with my MacBook Pro almost where ever I am. Good enough to start with!

Update!

Novatel responded quickly to my concerns about the PIN code and immediately updated their install instructions. They also revealed that they are working together with Apple to provide first-class drivers that will be bundled with Mac OS X itself. Thank you guys!

And today, Nov 10, the Swedish provider “3″, released HSDPA support. Now if only my provider would do the same. But I guess the ball is rolling now.