By the middle of last week we had made excellent progress with Apple US on driver development for the MiniMax. It was completely unexpected when we received the crushing news at the end of the week that Apple would not be able to provide drivers until earliest January next year.
As Mac support is a must for this product, we scrambled to find what other options we had. A brief spark of hope that Qualcomm might have a reference driver was soon extinguished, leaving us once again at square one for Mac OS MiniMax support.

All is not lost though, as our Mac interface developers have been able to contract a 3rd party US developer to create a driver specifically for us! At this stage we still hope to have a working Mac OS driver and GUI for the MiniMax at launch, allthough it will initally be as a separate download, rather than included with the product.

Following some time on hold while we worked out some marketing issues, development of our new look website is in full swing.

Continuing to learn from your feedback, we have endeavoured to provide sales and technical information in the most accessible way possible.

Here’s a development screenshot of what it will look like. Notice that any pictures and information on this page is purely for the look, and isn’t in any way actual data (the picture is not of the new minimax).

Following the MiniMax, our next modem in development is a replacement for our old MM-5100.  It will be a ‘drop-in’ replacement, with the same connectors and AT command set.  Some of the probable specs are described below.

 Features:

• Initial download speeds of up to around 3Mbps burst, probable sustainable speeds between 500-1500 kbps dependant on coverage and network usage. (Theoretical speeds are up to 3.6mbps)

• Upload speeds of up to 384 kbps burst dependant on coverage and network usage.

• Future possible download speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps burst (theoretical)

• Circuit Switched Data (ASYNC calls)

• SMS

• Voice

• Dual band (850 / 2100 MHz) support.

• Dual external antennas

• Direct replacement for MM-5100

Specifications:

System Requirements:

• Connection: USB Port or RS-232

• DC power (either via plug pack from AC power, or direct) – 6-36v

• Windows 2000 or XP for USB connectivity

Limitations:

The industrial modem will NOT support the following:

• Fax

• Windows versions older than 2000 (eg, ME or 98) other than through serial port.

For those who are interested, you can see some example pings and traceroutes done while connected with MiniMax here:MiniMax trace

If you wish to see a particular ping or traceroute (or other network test) feel free to post your request in a comment and we’ll do what we can!

Over the past week we have come up across a few difficulties with the Mac OS support for the Next G MiniMax. Primary among these was the fact that Mac OS does not yet have USB drivers that are compatible with the chipset which MiniMax uses (Qualcomm MSM-6280), without these drivers it is impossible to create connection software.

Following discussion with Apple (in Australia and the US), we are very pleased that the Apple hardware development team are working on providing USB drivers for this chipset. It will be tight, but we are still aiming to have Mac OS support for the Next G MiniMax at launch!