And here's the proof...

Ok, so having threatened to try it out, here's the proof that Newton + wireless card + Huawei E5830 + 3 = mobile email :)

It takes a bit of doing though. For some reason, 3 don't supply Mac dashboard software to configure the E5830. Online blogs and commentary suggest that there should be a web interface that allows a lot of configuration to be done, but that doesn't seem to work either. So, if you want to use any settings other than the defaults that are detailed in the card that comes with the device from 3, then you'll have to have something that runs Windows available. Luckily, I have a handy Windows XP laptop, so I changed the SSID to something more sensible, changed the security settings to Open and WEP and set a nice long hex key. After putting the same settings on the Newton card, email was picked up at first time of asking. Almost too easy - I was expecting a little more of a fight than that !

That said, it's not all perfect. The reception with the E5830 isn't as good as that with the old E220 USB dongle sadly, so in places where the E220 would at least get poor reception the E5830 gets nothing at all. There's something about the E5830's 'mini iPod in reverse' styling (brushed silver top, white plastic back) that feels slightly fragile somehow. And there's that irritation about the lack of Mac dashboard software. And for some reason adding my Yahoo POP3 account to Mail V seems to have driven it over the edge into unreliability - which combined with having to reset the date from 01/01/2008 every time a restart is required, and the huge amount of time lost because I'm using a 2Gb compact flash card is becoming rather old rather quickly, so I'll probably be looking at redoing my MailV config from scratch and going back to a 20Mb (or even 32Mb ... oooh !) linear flash card. But hey, the solution works, and it might be a reason to cancel my subscription to The Cloud (which I never really used much in the end, as when I'm in a Wetherspoons I'm not generally inclined to worry about email and I don't go into McDonalds much).

The wireless card is badged '2Wire', and the Newton recognises it as an NEC PK-WL001, btw.

Now if only nBlog would start behaving again (for which I actually blame Blogger) and I had a PDF reader on there...