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It’s easy to use, and well-built (as was the original, having survived being drenched in several pints of beer). Battery life feels improved, and fast 4G LTE internet is a welcome addition. The Skyroam Solis is an obvious improvement on the previous model. It’s clear that Skyroam intend the Solis to be used for light browsing, emailing, and social media. So, forget about torrenting the latest Game of Thrones on your next business trip, or streaming hours of HD video. If you use more than 500mb in a 24-hour period, Skyroam throttles your connection to 2.5G speeds, which are scarcely better than dial-up. Upload speeds, however, were consistently good. At its slowest, I got about 9Mbps down, while elsewhere I saw speeds as high as 42.25 Mbps.
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There was a greater spread between download and upload speeds. Latency was pretty solid, hovering around the 40ms mark. These ranged from leafy, quiet suburbs in the middle of the working day, to crowded city centers. I checked from several different locations to get a bigger picture. Speeds were solid, although as you’d expect, they varied massively. The Solaris lets you connect five devices simultaneously, making it great for couples and families, as well as those who hoard gadgets.
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I connected my laptop and iPhone to it, and after two hours of constant use (mostly consisting of Twitter and Spotify), it still had 93-percent of juice left. This will give you about 14 hours of internet access, although this will vary depending on how many devices are connected, and how heavily it’s being used. In terms of battery life, it comes with a 6,000 mAh battery. Although, as pointed out to me by a Skyroam representative, this comes at the expense of Wi-Fi time, as the hotspot and powerbank functionality all shares the same power reservoir. It also comes with a USB-C dongle, should you wish to charge your phone or tablet. The Solis comes with a USB-C port, which is used for charging. If you’ve ran out, it also lets you purchase more.Īnnoyingly, it’s not particularly well formatted for desktop browsers, although I suspect that’s because Skyroam expects people to use it predominantly on their mobile devices, as demonstrated by its usage policies. Here, you can see how much battery life is left, and how many day passes you’ve got left on your account. To manage the device, just connect to the hotspot and you’ll be taken to a capture page. Unlike the original Skyroam, the Solis is a much simpler product. Just imagine the toughest jar of pickles you’ve ever opened, and multiply that by ten. This isn’t technically difficult, although it’s a bit of an effort. Forget to do this, and the Solis won’t work. When you first use the Skyroam Solis, you have to twist open the device and remove some contacts from the battery. Suffice to say, it’s not about to win any beauty awards, although you’d be hard pressed to lose it on a dark night. The original looked a bit like a wedge of cheese, while the Solis is a thick orange disk, as demonstrated in the above video.
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For whatever reason, the official color of Skyroam is a garish “high-visibility jacket” orange.
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