Karma Wi-Fi Hotspot Review

Final Thoughts
I considered several of Karma’s competitors before making my decision. I won’t go too into detail on my reasoning, other than to say that the Social Bandwith thing was a major attractive factor and it’s already proven to be useful. Will it remain useful if Karma ends up saturating the market? Not so much, but I trust that Karma has a plan for that long-tail eventuality since their long-term business may depend on it.

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The speed was sufficient for my purposes when traveling. As a Ruby developer, a library I need is always a command away, but that requires Internet. My cellular phone provider offers LTE, but I don’t want to have to kill my phone battery by tethering.

I find its lack of status information disturbing, though. I can log into my Dashboard to see battery and signal status, but I don’t have a way to see who’s connected or their current throughput. Social Bandwidth keeps my metered usage my own, but I want some way to kick off someone who is hogging all the throughput!

I really like the Karma and I’m excited to have one of my own to use.

Pros:
– Decent battery life
– Acceptable throughput
– Tiny size makes it wonderfully portable – put it in your jacket pocket or velcro it to your laptop lid!
– Competitive pricing
– Those adept at persuasion may never again have a cellular data bill courtesy of Social Bandwidth referral bonuses

Cons:
– Coverage outside of cities is non-existent, but the 2014 LTE migration will change that
– A bit pricey upfront, wagering that you can refer others to earn bandwidth is a bit of a gamble
– Not currently an easy way to share bandwidth with someone else, but bandwidth gifting is a coming feature

Want to help feed this writer’s data addiction? Click this referral link, sign up, get both of us 500 MB of Karma’s Social Bandwidth.

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