Was lucky enough to get a early release preview for the Mudi so seeing some of the posts here asking questions thought I’d add a quick and dirty mini review (sorry for the poor pictures but just taken with my phone)
Sorry I’ve just realized that the photos are “too big” you’ll have to click on the photos to get the full story on some pics
The Mudi comes with everything you need including a mesh carry bag. It’s a departure from the MiFi and Spitz in that rather than white, it’s black. IMHO opinion it looks much sleeker and not as industrial as the other units.
Here it is size wise compared with the Spitz, the MiFi and the M7
Bit hard to compare them really as they’re all different shapes and sizes
There is a fair difference though in the heights
The other thing that needs to be taken into account with size is that the Mudi doesn’t have a built in ethernet ports like the Spitz or MiFi, it’s a USB-C docking connector, and in comparison there’s only one port compared to two on the other units.
Compared to my Xiaomi A2 Lite 5.84" screen
The Nano SIM and Micro-SD card slot is under a door on the bottom. I did find the door a bit hard to open at first but seem have the hang of it now. The nice thing is because it supports a nano sim I don’t have to use a nano to micro adapter which always caused me issues no matter what sort of micro holder (spring push in, slide under bar) mechanism is on other units.
The Mudi comes with a neat little OLED display which gives much more information than a bunch of flashing LEDs Note however it’s not the easiest to read outside in direct sunlight and the shiny cover is going to be a fingerprint magnet if that sort of thing worries you.
Once booted you get some nice useful information again much easier to know what’s going on than referring to LEDs.
By default if you press the power button again you cycle though the SSID and passphrase for 2.4 and 5Ghz WiFi LANS, the routers address and operating mode (default 192.168.8.1) and the VPN status. You can either turn off displaying the passphrase or completely “remove” these screens. I’ve turned this off for security reasons and this can easily be done in the Luci interface (Advanced → System->MCU interface)
Press the power button on the main screen for 3 seconds and the unit goes into power saving mode. This puts the unit into a “resume” type mode. Turns everything off but without turning the unit off. Another 3 second press will disable power save mode.and quickly make the unit operational again.
When it’s off , if you need to check how much battery you’ve got just press the power button.
I’m not going to go into the interface here because it’s just the good ole standard Gl.iNet front end with Luci underneath. The nice thing I like about the GL.iNet products is that if you can configure all their units with the same interface without having to relearn.
I’ve only had for a day so still playing with. With the EP06-E module, I’m getting the same sort of speeds I get with my Spitz with EP06-E on Telstra (Oz’s main Telco) and OpenVPN wise I got about 8-11Mbps (on around a 35Mbps LTE link)
All in all, this is a nice little unit. It’s not the smallest unit out there but don’t forget it contains a 7000mAh battery inside which should keep the unit going for a while as well as having the ability to charge your phone in a real emergency (turn off the phone to reduce draw and charge quicker).
The addition of the OLED screen means you can get more meaningful information easily (I especially like the number of connected users), but it is a bit hard to read outside.
All in all this looks like another great Gl.iNet router to add to the collection especially if you’re a bit of a traveller that uses LTE.