Tablet and Mobile

Archive for the ‘WIFI’ Category

Some time ago, I took my (then) Apple iPhone 3GS and jailbroke it. Why? Because I could and because I was sick of Orange trying to charge £10 a month for letting me share the 3G connection with my laptop.

That’s all history now, Orange have been kicked into touch in favour of the vastly superior THREE company and I now share unlimited 3G with my various devices.. When I moved up to the iPhone 4 I really could not see the point of jailbreaking the phone – but the Apple TV2 is different.  One of the biggest uses for Apple TV is to watch movies and guess what – you’re stuck with iTunes on your PC and Apple format movies.

Neither of the above is a problem for me – but converting movies to Apple format is not something your average person has much time for (couple of hours per video)… and so I took the plunge and had the thing jailbroken using the latest Sn0wbreeze (yup, that is spelled correctly).

The process is easy enough and takes a matter of half an hour including setup but the results are spectacular. Now I can watch movies and listen to music in a variety of formats. Not only that but I also have access to a NetGear ReadyNas Duo, an inexpensive and rather neat network backup device which just happens to be able to stream to the Apple TV – which means no more need to leave a computer on to access movies, pictures and music on the Apple TV. Between the low cost of Apple TV2 (sub-£100) and the Duo ~(sub-£100 excluding disks) – and the nature of the Duo which means with 2 disks you have redundancy (both store identical content – so if one disk goes down you continue on as normal) I now have a reliable solution for handling media at home without using a PC and without lengthy media conversion to suit Apple. It just so happens that software is available for both iPad and iPhone to handle this scenario also.

So is it worth jailbreaking the Apple TV2?  Most definitely – but if it turns your box into a stone – you are of course on your own – follow the Sn0wbreeze instructions carefully.

Update – at the time of writing – Apple TV 2 on the latest software (IOS5) cannot be successfully and usefully jailbroken – which is a shame. Of you want to use jailbreaking – don’t upgrade!

The new iPad2 just keeps going from strength to strength!

For new readers, no I’m not an Apple Fanboy, I’ve been a Windows man since, well, DOS! But then there is the concept of “the right tool for the job” – Windows has it’s place – and so does the iPad2. Tonight I was sitting here getting on with some work on my Windows 7 PC (if anyone is still using XP or Vista, do yourself a favour if it’s not cost-prohibitive – bin them – Windows 7 is light years ahead) and my wife (who is currently in the USA while I’m here in sunny downtown Wark in Northumberland) rang me on Facetime (which for those of you not in the know is Apple’s kind-of equivalent of Skype).  I picked up the iPad2 and pressed the connect button and there she was – in a Barnes and Noble somewhere in Chicago – for all the world you’d think she was next door and we had a nice chat as I went off looking for the new kitten (she’s been away for a week and kittens grow quickly).

After waving to our pal Debby I asked her to switch cameras to the back camera – at which point I got a good look around the shop before ending the (free) call.  I recall before we got married you were talking a dollar a minute thanks to greedy BT (well, their predecessor) and their US equivalent.. thankfully – those times are gone forever and BTs claim to owning the Internet went no-where – what a joke.

Maureen and I chatted for a while as I got a good look around the store..  and then we ended the call and I noted a new update for Splashtop – which is a program that sits on your PC or PCs at home which then lets them talk to your iPad (for the techies, much like LOGMEIN but about a century ahead of the latter). I popped into the house and upgraded Maureen’s PC.  Some time and a glass of wine later I figured I’d give it a whirl. For the uninitiated, Splashtop and Logmein are programs that let you access the screen and keyboard of one PC from another – in the case of the latter – you can access your PCs from your iPad or iPad2.

Well, I don’t know if it was the upgrade or the extra speed of the iPad2 but I’m here to say that sitting in my office, I accessed Maureen’s Windows 7 PC from the iPad2 and went off to the BBC website – selected the latest news video (Flash – which the iPad doesn’t support natively for good reason) and ran the video. You would NOT believe for a SECOND that you were watching this remotely – PERFECT video, PERFECT audio, PERFECT sync – the power of a desktop PC in my hand!

The future of computing… remote access to any PC you own – and video access to those you know… on a lightweight, all-day-battery tablet – is here! It actually blows away the original Star-Trek concept which was limited to boring technical data only – but then that was a generation ago.

What we need now – is better, more universally available WIFI (FAR more important than 3G and it’s successors IMHO) studio lighting on the tablets so you look good in a pub when video conferencing – and that’s simple –strips down both sides of the tablet that light up white (high efficiency but WARM LED lighting – now readily available)… UTTERLY practical due to the low power requirements of warm white LEDs. and hey – this was MY IDEA!!!! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Technology that works – warm sunny weather in APRIL… what MORE could you want?

 

http://www.apple.com/uk/ipad/?cid=mc-uk-ipad-g_ipad2_brd_uk-ipad2

http://www.splashtop.com/remote

http://www.apple.com/uk/iphone/features/facetime.html

After all the media hype about “iPad killers” – has anyone noticed how quiet things have gotten recently? Novatech’s Windows 7 tablet got a severe bashing because Windows 7 remains badly-equipped for use by large fingers and the screen on that machine apparently isn’t that clever at an angle. Currys withdrew one of their two available Android models and so basically if you go shopping you’ll find the iPad and the Galaxy Tab, the latter of course being only 7” and having a lower-resolution screen than the iPad – the Tab did however in it’s first month manage to sell a respectable 1 million units so one would be daft to ignore it.

Other than that, what? The Dell Streak is basically a phone so really the Tab and the iPad are the only real players actually out there if you ignore the many units available on the web using older versions of Android and therefore hardly in the game. It amazes me that other manufacturers look to be going to miss the Christmas opportunity – I’d hoped that the Archos 101 would be the next contender because of it’s amazing price but according to PC PRO, it too has issues with poor screen readability. The reason this is important is because, unlike software, you can’t really upgrade the unit later to overcome such difficulties.

So why do we even need competition for the iPad? The unit is solid, reasonably priced, works a treat… yes indeed but the Apple unit still has some way to go before you’d throw the laptop out…

I’ve written a lot about the benefits of the iPad…. here’s a list of things that are NOT so good about the current iPad:

• No memory expansion
• No USB
• No camera
• No FLASH
• Airplay is still far from perfect
• Airprint is currently a joke, working only with a very limited number of printers
• The WIFI on the iPad still does not handle multiple access points properly

When the iPad came out, mobile connectivity packages were pants in the UK, with Orange and Vodafone competing to see who could offer the least monthly download for your money – and so 3G connectivity seemed like a joke which is why I bought the WIFI-only model – well that and the price, the top-of-the-range iPad is IMHO just too expensive for what you get – but then along came THREE who offer up to 15GB a month – now THAT’S more like it.  I’m using their branded MIFI unit and believe me, going through that amount of data is QUITE DO-ABLE so running a tablet on 3G really does need this kind of monthly allocation if you’re going to make heavy use of the unit.

Internet beginners might well ask “how on earth can you use up 15GB in a month” – well, let’s see, in a one-hour trip up the M6 listening to “The Big Cheese” radio station (as against various crap BBC stations which fade in and out and tend to bore one to death) I managed to consume 250Mb. I’ve never checked but I’m prepared to bet that watching an episode of “Have I got News for You” on the iPlayer would use up even more! Hopefully you get the point… if all you do is browse the web then the likes of the 3GM/monthly packages will probably do the job for you but once you see the possibilities that modern mobile systems such as the iPad, Galaxy and the new, larger mobile phones can give you, data use tends to rocket. I could see daily use of 1GB quite easily which takes you up to around the 15GB monthly allowance.

Once Apple get their act together with Skype and give us an iPad 2 with Skype video (or more likely, short term, Skype adds video to it’s Android line-up?) I could see video calls finally taking off en-masse – and that could change everything.

The good news is that various mobile operators are now starting to subsidise these tablets with contracts so the price barrier is starting to go away.

Meanwhile I’ve been struggling with the limits of Apple’s iTunes, probably the most miserable program in my PC armada of programs, iTunes excels in one thing and one thing only – organising your music collection.  If you’ve never looked at this, here’s my music line-up….

I’ve one PC at home that looks after our pictures, music and videos and stays turned on (monitor off) 24/7. It runs iTunes and talks to the Apple TV2 unit attached to our TV. Simply inserting a CD into the computer results in the entire contents of the CD including cover artwork, ending up copied to the hard drive and hence available within iTunes along with our pics and movies.

That in itself isn’t a great deal of use, but thanks to the addition of Apple TV and REMOTE (an App for both iPhone and iPad which lets you remotely control iTunes, select tracks and even build playlists) it is now possible to access all our media on the TV via a choice of remote control, iPhone or iPad – and it all works very well indeed. We tend to keep our latest pictures on Google Web Albums and access to that is missing like a sore thumb from Apple TV which prefers FLICKR (I don’t, mainly because of their association with Getty and Corbis) and I’m looking forward to the advent of APPS for Apple TV in the hope that one of them will add Google Web Album capability.

iTunes of course is far from perfect, the Airplay output to Apple TV straight from the PC will not work on either our main media PC or my laptop however thankfully via REMOTE, the PC will indeed stream to the TV without issue.

iTunes however is woefully inadequate at sorting tunes from a variety of sources or even in some cases at getting the right artwork so I’ve pressed two other programs into service – TUNEUP which is not free but does a great jog of getting artworks – and MediaMonkey which can be free and has some great facilities for organising your media. At long last I now have a working, practical media setup. All I need now is something to convert the optical output from the Apple unit – to work with my slightly-out-of-date HI-FI amplifier – it’s either that or scrap the TV and get one which has audio OUTPUT as well as input!

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.

As I sit here in the early hours there is still no sign of the much-anticipated 4.2 IOS updates. The plan is they will be with us this week and will provide unity among all of the iTouch/iPhone/iPad gadgets. The important recipient of this upgrade of course will be the iPad as it is currently miles behind the iPhone in terms of multi-tasking and folders etc so that will be my first upgrade and I’m quite excited about the prospect!

But there is more as I’ve recently discovered… and what does this have to do with Apple TV you might ask? Well, a lot…

Rewinding a few days, it’s Maureen’s birthday today and I’ve been struggling with what to buy her. She’s an avid fan of watching movies on the go and uses her small laptop for email, music and movies – she’s also a fan of YouTube and we often turn this on when we have parties so folks can pick their own music video selections – it goes down well.  I’d planned on getting on of the new Android tablets for her and accordingly we sold her little Atom-powered netbook. Another option on the cards was a Windows 7 powered tablet… but that option quickly disappeared when I started cleaning up the netbook for sale and was reminded how painfully slow they are. In one of those Eureka moments I twigged that no matter what, a Windows 7/Atom powered tablet is going to be AT LEAST as slow as the netbook – and that’s just not on. So now we’re back to Android or Apple iPad.

Next stop PC World to check out the Android tablets. Well, really, despite the promise, what’s out there is just, well, rubbish. The new Galaxy Tab from Samsung is now available in the shops… and it has a VERY nice bright display, smooth touch-screen – and a camera!!! But hold on it still uses Android 2.2 – the very operating system that it’s designers, Google say is NOT ready for tablet use. Their own site states merely that  “Android 2.2 is a minor platform release including user features, developer features, API changes, and bug fixes”.

It seems manufacturers are jumping on the bandwagon eager to get product out regardless of the suitability or otherwise of the software. “Gingerbread” or Android 2.3 is supposed to be going to be much better – but WHO KNOWS – as we can’t get our hands on it to try it out – it might be no better than current offerings. The lady at PC World did her damndest to convince me that because the Galaxy Tab has a camera, it runs Skype video – which is just absolute TOSH. The Android implementation of Skype doesn’t even have a video SETTING! Of course neither does the iPhone or iPad but I’d be prepared to bet that with the possibility of an iPad 2 with video camera widely touted to appear next year, negotiations will be taking place.  The first fully working tablet with Skype video gets my vote. Why? When there are other alternatives such as Apple’s own video conferencing software? Simple really, the other alternatives have such a small market share they’re not worth a light. If you have Apple’s video conferencing solution it’s only going to work with other people with the same software – and that’s a very small number. Skype on the other hand has for some time been the most widely used of it’s kind, it’s free, it works on a variety of platforms and when I say works… with a good connection it is absolutely EXCELLENT and I can say that with a LOT of professional experience of running meetings over Skype.

But I digress, the point of this is that we decided to become a 2-iPad family, but once Maureen heard of the possibility of an iPad with video she’s decided for now to save up her pennies and wait. Which took us next to the iPad store and Apple TV afte a brief conversation with a fellow enthusiast in PC-World.

You may be aware that the new IOS enhancements will include something called Airplay, a piece of software that allows you to stream video and audio from one device to another… and this is where Apple TV comes in. Far from unique, the new Apple TV device comes in at just under £100 – a small and typically beautiful piece of Apple engineering, it plugs into your HD TV (hdmi only, owners of older TVs can look away now) and the Internet and lets you then, via it’s simple remote control, do a variety of things from streaming movies (an alternative if you like to LoveFilm) for a price (maybe £3.50 typically) from the Internet… but that’s only the beginning. If you’re an Apple user, you will typically have your music and movies on iTunes on one of your PCs. Certainly I’m no lover of the iTunes program, I think it’s slow and clunky but it does make sense to have all your multi-media in one place and I guess this is where Apple TV device differs from the rest – full integration with iTunes. Of course you can download or SYNC from iTunes to your iPad/iPhone/iTouch devices… but with the new Airplay will come the possibility to STREAM the media rather than download it.  Apple TV not only lets you rent movies but will work with your iTunes selection to make the lot (movies, music, pictures) onto your regular TV, straight over your Internet connection. Not only THAT but it will also (apparently, once the devices have been upgraded) allow you to view media playing on your devices ON THE TV by streaming straight from the device. I should point out that like iTunes, Apple TV does not like for example DIVX video and so you have to convert your movies to an Apple-compatible format such as M4V which thankfully works for PCs etc just as well as DIVX – assuming you have VLC or similar.

But it gets better, you can ALSO watch video podcasts, YouTube and Flickr accounts directly on Apple TV – the device uses less power than a nightlight and runs freezing cold.. all this for under £100. So, is this a pipedream? Well, I can’t tell you about Airplay until it comes out but the rest WORKS – and more, a trained monkey could set it up. This then would appear to be a must-have and it’s certainly the best thing I’ve bought since the iPad. Thankfully there is a free solution in the form of HANDBRAKE – a  rather superb free video convertor (Google it). I’m busy converting my movies over now..

Well, the BAD news is – the new Android Tablet from Dixons/Currys/PC World is going to be DOA. Firstly it will NOT handle 3G – and secondly it will NOT access the Android Marketplace.  They plan on bringing out one that has both, in the new year sometime – I can only imagine they’re bringing out this DOA version to test the market. Punters who haven’t a clue what they’re looking for will no doubt spot the pretty display in the shop and take it away. By the time they realise they’ve bought a puppy it’ll be too late.

If this had firstly had the 3g capability and secondly handled the Android market – at £249.00 it would have been a serious contender – but with WIFI only and no access to the important market – the chances are you won’t even be able to get hold of a half-decent PDF reader for it. 

Such a shame – but there are plenty of competitors around the corner… and of course for only £150 more you can have the real thing!!  November is coming up fast which means the 4.2 IOS upgrade for the iPad must surely be just around the corner.

The Archos 101 which costs just a little more has the same issues, no 3G (which isn’t THAT big a deal) and no marketplace (which probably IS that big a deal)…

(DOA: Dead on Arrival)

I love using that term “iPad Killer” – of course there is no such thing as yet.. but.. “one to watch” as they say is Currys (also PC WORLD’s) forthcoming Advent Vega device. This was supposed to be released on the 18th of October but on the 15th, staff at Currys didn’t have a clue what was happening –(update: November 16th it’s still not out).

The Advent Vega uses the 1Ghz NVideo Tegra chipset with 1024*600 resolution, same width but slightly less height than the iPad. There is an HDMI output for 1080p HD output to your TV which is nice, it has a 1.3 megapixel camera (but no doubt no support for Skype video so it’s likely to be fairly useless along with the cameras on other devices unless iPad2 convinces Skype to add video mode), Android 2.2 Froyo (which means FLASH support), a 3G Sim slot (often referred to in other articles as 3GB because they are replicating someone else’s incorrect spec without using their brains – and there is no indication as to whether it actually works or is there for the future like the connectors on Sky’s crappy HD box), almost no useful RAM but a microSD slot with 4GB already populated. Mine will go in the bin in favour of at least 16GB.

So why are you even reading this? Well, the 3G is nice at the projected price of £249  IF – and it’s a big IF, it will allow you to drop the SIM in from, say your Vodafone dongle – then tablet use anywhere (along with the option to use FON or BTOPENZONE etc) becomes a reality. Ok, you can do that with the iPAD but not at anywhere near that price and I think the 3G iPad uses a micro-Sim?? I just bought the WIFI version – as I thought the extra cost was excessive.

The Claim is 6.5 hours of video use – not as good as the iPad’s 10 hours but not to be sneezed at… even Currys don’t claim this to be of the highest spec… but it’ll be interesting to see in action.

Remember however that FROYA (Android 2.2) was not designed specifically for tablet use – there is as yet no decent EXCHANGE client for Android (that I can find) and as far as I’m aware, still no SKYPE.

Ok, looking at the VIDEO below – this is SUPPOSED to be it… and supposed to be a genuine demo. IF it lives up to the video – and it takes a normal SIM etc.. we may have a WINNER here.

Update:

Curry’s have NO IDEA when it’s coming in – they were going to ring me back this afternoon – and PC-World thought a couple of weeks but didn’t really know.. As for Dixons at the airport, the guy didn’t have the foggiest idea what I was talking about. See this extract from someone who got their hands on it – the highlighting is mine…

“The Advent Vega has two key weak spots. Firstly, (and this is the corner that’s been cut) the camera, which is a 1.3MP front facing camera, will be pretty useless. Secondly, it has no 3G, yet. The Vega tablet we saw had a 3G slot, and while it has nothing in it now, that’s something that Adam Lockyer, the category manager for Advent said would be added, and an Advent Vega would be available in early next year with 3G capabilities.”

All very interesting, I wonder if the shop will CLAIM the 3g works?

They’re kidding, right? The forthcoming Galaxy Tab Android Tablet is a little 7” thing and they’re going to charge £600 ??? Ok it has a camera – but then unless they get a deal with SKYPE to get SKYPE video on there – it’s not going to be any use to anyone. Their AD CLAIMS video calls – but unless it’s SKYPE – who’re you going to call? Ghostbusters??   I have a 7” Android unit here and believe me it is TINY compared to the iPAD – I was hoping for something nearer £300. The basic iPad is only £420 and as we now have WIFI just about everywhere (especially if you’re a BT user and sign up to the free FON network which gives you free access to other FON user’s WIFI) – is the 3G really that big a deal (especially now that unlimited use is now history).

Meanwhile it turns out that 30 of the most popular Android Apps are sharing data with third parties without making it clear to users!

I think they’ve some way to go yet…

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of BT…. but we’re just putting together a holiday rental place in Bellingham and one of the things I needed to organise was broadband. It turns out that TalkTalk, my first option can’t handle that part of town – something to do with exchange – so I turned to BT.  The package turned up today and one of the things you can do if you have BT Total Broadband is share a little of it securely with the outside world – something called BT FON. Fon were around on their own years ago but the team-up of BT and FON means that now countless thousands of people share their WIFI for free – in return for getting to use everyone elses!

Now…

Having done that (you have to go to the BT Fon site and actually sign up – if you have BT Broadband and one of their routers, PLEASE DO)… I now have access to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of BT FON and BT OPENZONE WIFI sites… and in case you’re wondering – if you don’t have BT, go to the FON SITE and buy one of their routers and you get the same deal – share a little, GET A LOT!!!  How much of your WIFI do you share – no more than 512K and it’s completely isolated from your own so it’s a win-win situation.

Did it work? Well, I walked down the road in my little village where my iPhone is normally USELESS due to no Orange signal – and noted one of the signals – put in my name and password – and VOILA I was browsing the BBC website in no time.

This really DOES look like the liberation of WIFI and you should take a look! APPARENTLY there are sites abroad you can use, too!!!

More on this as I learn more but take a look at the BT FON site.. and if you’re not on BT – the FONERA site… I’ve done my bit by liberating my WIFI for others – now if several million others would do the same…..

This makes my WIFI-only iPAD a LOT more useful out on the road!!!!  Not to mention the phone (SKYPE).

Pete.