Tablet and Mobile

Archive for the ‘MIFI’ Category

Anyone new to the iPad may not be aware that there are two basic types – those with 3G and those without. Now of course, Orange are planning on offering the iPad at discounted prices with a contract – but think about this…

Firstly, the contract will be £25 or more monthly, secondly even though the price is discounted, you’ll have also to pay through the nose for the version of iPad with 3G. which is much more expensive than the basic WIFI version. Thirdly you won’t be able to make use of that broadband anywhere else – for example with a laptop – because Apple are really, really restrictive about that kind of thing. You can’t even tether your iPhone to your iPad without jailbreaking it.

All in all, it seems there should be a better way… and there is.

Essentially what you’re looking for is a way to get a signal to your iPad as cheaply as possible and as often as possible – because without connectivity, well, it’s not a lot of use other than for playing scrabble and reading books!!!

I’ve tried all sorts of combinations, believe me – and one of my favourites until now was to take the SIM from my Vodafone card, put it into a Nokia S60 phone and use a little program called Joikuspot to share the 3G signal via WIFI with the iPad (again for newcomers, the iPad doesn’t have USB so dongles are basically useless). Indeed at one time I used a small plug-in-the-wall unit that took in the dongle and dished out WIFI – but typical of stuff made in China, they never kept up with the ever-changing designs of dongle – this is NOT the way to go.

So, until they kit out the iPhone 9000 with WIFI sharing and an FM transmitter (dream on)… here’s my NEW solution:

The MIFI unit as sold by THREE and others is a little pocket unit (rechargeable battery powered) that takes in 3G and dishes out WIFI – it’s as simple as that. It comes complete with a charger and a USB lead for setup (and even the latter is un-necessary). You turn it on and immediately it appears as a WIFI router to your laptop, phone, iPad etc. BUT — doesn’t that stop you making phone calls on your iPad? Not really, I use SKYPE for all my phone calls and it works a treat. Now that IOS 4.2 is out, you can run Skype on your iPad and leave it running all the time. I have a SKYPE IN number and so now I’m available on the same number whether I’m in my office or on the road – thanks to the MIFI unit.

If you wish to set up the unit to your requirements, you can plug it into a PC and set the name, password etc… but that’s up to you, it works out of the box. No wires, no complicated setup, it just works. Your monthly data allowance on this unit. Please note you get a mains charger, not a car charger – in my case I have 240v available in the car but you might want to consider that situation as the MIFI unit in use gets about 4.5 hours out of a charge (when it’s turned on).

Now, I might hear you say… but Vodafone have coverage country-wide.. well, that’s what I thought and I was very wary about throwing in the towel with my now redundant dongle (there is NO advantage to the dongles now other than battery life as they don’t have a battery), so armed with a lot of travelling to, I set off to test the MIFI unit.

The trip from Blackpool to Wark in Northumberland is fraught with communications issues, the mountainous area around the lakes – and the A69 to say the least. I used my iPhone (as against iPad) for the testing, putting it into flight mode and re-enabling WIFI so I could be sure that any connection was coming from the MIFI unit. I switched on Internet radio, plugged the iPhone into my car stereo… tuned in RIVIERA RADIO – my favourite Monaco radio station – and off I went.

To cut a long story short, from Blackpool to Wark, the first time the radio went off was near Hexham and that lasted about a minute, then about a mile away from Wark, the radio went dead and stayed that way… but then, that’s what happens with Orange and Vodafone!  So was THREE any less available than the others? Well, NO! The little display on the MIFI unit told me I’d used about 250Mbytes along the way, the battery was about half-way down at the end of the trip… as you’d expect… and for the first time ever, I began to realise that listening to radio stations almost anywhere in the world while on the move is, at last a reality!

I’m using Internet radio as an example but of course there are many other uses for constantly available WIFI on the move – Google MAPS being another example.

Normally, using 250Mbyte on a trip would be very expensive, the mobile operators really haven’t yet gotten to grips with the idea that they started setting our expectations high with this nonsense about “unlimited data” which they’ve now all but scrapped… but THREE offer from 1GB a month for £9 up to 15GB a month for £22 and these prices can only come down. I’m sure others will come up with similar deals before long if they’ve not already started – the point being, on the larger contract I could do that trip 60 times a month before running out of data!!

In a previous blog you might notice I mentioned the free Connectify App for the Windows-7-powered PC which lets you share a hardwired Internet connection (or indeed a dongle connection) via WIFI with your iPad or whatever. In both cases you can share this connection with a small number of machines, so that for example in a small meeting as long as ONE of you has a connection, the rest can share not matter what kind of device you have (I discount phones with no WIFI ability here as being relics of the past not worth considering – if you still have such a beast, perhaps it’s time to move on?). Beware the jury is out on this program – last month’s version was using up PC resources too quickly, the current beta APPEARS to work but if you notice anything up with your computer after installing… there’s your culprit.

So there you have it… with WIFI available all over the UK for free for BT customers (BT FON, OPENZONE) and WIFI via a MIFI available for an entirely reasonable monthly contract,surely this HAS to be the future for your tablet and other devices?

Made my day, I can tell you.

Oh, about Connectify…  great program but this has to be be the cheesiest advert of all time..

 

Of course, if you’re lucky enough to have an updated Froyo device, say an HTC Desire with Android 2.2 or better, then you may well already have WIFI sharing – that is if your service provider has not disabled it or otherwise made it useless.  I’ll be testing the Desire next to see how it performs.

While still awaiting for my MYFI device to turn up, I was sitting in a hotel in Blackpool last night with a dilemma. I wanted to check for updated APPS on my newly-upgraded-to-ios4.2 iPad… but with no connection (WIFI-only IPAD). Normally in hotels these days, WIFI is widely available but in this particular hotel they only had plug-in free Internet access. FINE for my laptop but not a great deal of use for the iPad as it has neither a network connector nor USB.

With the MIFI one simply turns it on, it picks up 3G and makes that available as WIFI.  Similarly some phones (sadly not the iPhone unless you jailbreak it) have software available to share the 3G as WIFI. I didn’t have one of those either.

Then it hit me – surely someone has a program to share a hard-wired Internet connection on the laptop via it’s WIFI interface.

Sure enough, there is such a beast – and it’s free. Connectify effectively turns your laptop into a WIFI hot-spot, taking in whatever connection you have (3g from a dongle or a hardwired connection) and letting you share this over the wireless connection. (Update… Connectify can use up CPU resources  – ensure you have a fast PC or laptop and if you get issues with your PC – un-install).

The program installed without issue on my 64-bit Windows 7 laptop and once I’d set the name and password, in seconds it was happily dishing out WIFI to my iPad.

GRANTED it’s a bit excessive having to use a laptop for this purpose, hopefully the MIFI will turn up in the post today and I’ll update the blog accordingly after giving it a good hammer.

I’ve also been playing with the now free FIND IPHONE application which together with a free MobileMe account. Simple enough, the account logs your current location with their servers on a regular basis and the free program can be used to tell you where your iPad or iPhone is hiding. Of course the program isn’t much use if you’ve actually lost the device in question and a web-based equivalent will help you out there, letting you start a sound, leave a message or WIPE your iPhone remotely – rather handy if you keep confidential data therein!