WMWifiRouter as alternative to the MiFi – A brief comparison and some time travel into Windows Mobile history.

29 10 2009

After using the MiFi 2352 for some month now I’m really hooked to the concept when going to foreign (roaming) countries. Previously I had to change my internet usage when outside of my home country. Now it’s just the additional switch on and off for the MiFi.

But unfortunately does my MiFi have problems with charging (MiFi 2352 – Does Novatel have a larger problem with charger or device?) so it’s traveling back and forth to the supplier. For some trips I had to find an alternative.

In the back of my mind I remembered that I tested WMWifiRouter a year back. So I dug out my old Windows Mobile (HTC Hermes) and bought a version of the software for € 19.99. My trail license had expired. After 15 minutes for the download and some configuration everything was set to go.

Thumbnail: http://www.wmwifirouter.com/

Sidenote: Windows Mobile is so “old” compared to the iPhone

For me this was the first time I used Windows Mobile after switching over to the iPhone in September ‘08. And to be clear: I was a heavy and long-time Windows Mobile user. Which means that my Windows Mobile history goes back to the first Casio Windows CE device (without mobile phone in 1998 and black and white screen) .

I used my Windows Mobile device (the latest was the HTC Hermes) daily, mostly for an hour or more. My device was heavily customized and tailored to my needs and had plenty of additional apps installed. But after a year with the iPhone it felt like a trip back in history. I found most of the settings I needed to make very fast. But the overall GUI impression including the touch interface was really bad. It’s amazing how fast I adopted the iPhone UI and how fast my requirements set for applications changed-For now there is definitely no way back.

Brief Comparison

Comparing the MiFi to the HTC Hermes with installed WMWifirouter seems like comparing apples and oranges.But however I just do it.

  HTC Hermes with WMWifiRouter Novatel MiFi 2352
Pro
  • Display delivers better information on status
  • UI based configuration.
  • Could remain on when Wireless Hotspot was deactivated as battery wouldn’t be drained.
  • Very light
  • Simple usage – just one button to switch on and off
    • Web interface for configuration
    • WPA and WPA2 encryption for the WLAN

Con
  • Only WEP encryption for the WLAN connection
  • More weight.
  • More complicated to activate.
  • LED status display inferior

Equal
  • Similar activation time
  • Overall Internet delivery performance felt the same.
  • Battery time roughly 4 hours when permanently used.
  • Different UI but similar configuration options.
  • Similar activation time
  • Overall Internet delivery performance felt the same.
  • Battery time roughly 4 hours when permanently used.
  • Different UI but similar configuration options.

Overall the WMWifiRouter might be an alternative for you if you have some old Windows Mobile hardware just sitting around.

- PersTechLife –


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Syncing read status between different Twitter clients – A first solution

15 09 2009

To be honest: I’m using Twitter not very intensely. One of my Facebook accounts is used to update my Facebook status, another to follow some 40 interesting people or companies. My followed people generate roughly 400 tweets a day. I normally browse through their writing using my iPhone during short breaks. Sometimes during TV commercial interruptions. Sometimes while in transit or just while waiting for something to happen. When at home at my work desk  I also use my desktop system (Mac) to get an update.

What had bothered me for while is the lack of sync between different systems of what I have already read. Honestly I don’t understand why this is so complicated. I had hoped that Tweetdeck or Seesmic had implemented this until now. But so far the Seesmic iPhone Client is still missing, Tweetdeck has some sync functionality for searches.

Echofon as a first solution

After having tested a number of iPhone clients, I worked and stayed with ‘Twitterfon Pro’ for a steady couple of month. Today they released their update version. Beneath a name change to ‘Echofon’ they also announced that they implemented a sync function and push notification.

Echofon web page

Right now, the sync function requires a Firefox plugin on the desktop client side. After installing both clients I had to:

  1. adjust the Twitter account settings to enable push notification and allow ‘read status sync on the iPhone side
  2. enable the same on the Mac side

 It’s working

At least I got i working, but the Firefox AddOn is not really a beauty compared to full feature Twitter clients. It took me some time to find the Echofon symbol within Firefox. I reloaded Firefox several times and always tried to add a toolbar symbol which I couldn’t find. I finally found the greyed out symbol in the bar on the bottom line of Firefox. The symbol became active after login into my Twitter account using the right mouse click on the symbol.

On their web site Echofon also announces a full Mac client. So I’m looking forward to this.

I’m currently not fully clear on the exact sync intervals. At least it sync, when I switch within the iPhone app once to "’Messages” and back to the “Friends” tab.

- PTL - 


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MiFi 2352 on the road experience [Update 1 + 2]

22 08 2009

We just returned from vacation tour through several places in Germany. Overall a great trip plus the MiFi added additional pleasure for all of our devices (2 * iPhone + a Windows 7 notebook) and saved us a lot of money, compared to hotel WiFi charges and roaming charges.

The Network experience

Before we left I had bought and setup a PrePaid Fonic card. I bought the SIM card and activated the daily data flat rate plan. Their pricing scheme is simple, you are charged € 2.49 per day of usage with a drop back to EDGE speed after using 1 GB. Fonic leverages the German O2 GSM network. Since being taken over by Telefonica, O2 has invested into their network, so that I expected good UMTS or even HSUPA coverage. This expectation was fully met at our first location. The MiFi immediately picked up a HSUPA signal and delivered very good network connection, after it had started to work (details later).

Our second stop provided a challenge. We had chosen to spent a week on the island Usedom. near the border to Poland. Landscape and tourism are the most prominent feature of this location. Network speed dropped back to GPRS speed. For my typical notebook usage this was definitely not enough, e-mail and Google Reader on the iPhone worked ok. Luckily we had very good weather and no situation required me to connect the notebook to the cloud. Other networks (mostly T-Mobile), had in some places UMTS coverage. As I now from previous trips to Germany, that T-Mobile has a good and wide-spread 3G network plus complete EDGE coverage I have now established a contingency solution with Ja! Mobil. Ja! Mobil uses the T-Mobile network, has a daily flat rate for € 2.49 and a maximum connection speed of 384 kB/sec (UMTS speed).

All further stops, mostly metropolitan areas in Germany, again had mostly full HSUPA coverage.

The MiFi experience

After unpacking our stuff in our first location I quickly wanted to check my e-mail, tried to switch on the MiFi and nothing happened. It had worked some hours earlier but now nothing happened. Probably the battery was empty, so I hooked it up to the AC charger and we left the hotel.Later that evening still the same problem. So I started to examine the problem. The MiFi seems to "crash" immediately after plugging in the power supply (solid red LED indicator)

To make a long story short: the delivered charger doesn’t work with the MiFi. My MiFi currently only charges using the supplied USB <-> MicroUSB cable and any USB power supply, e.g. iPhone AC charger, USB car battery charger or notebook USB port. I later bought a Motorola power supply for standard MicroUSB devices, but the effect remains the same.

Besides this problem the MiFi worked as expected and connected us to the cloud. The only downside is the approx. 10 second wait time before it starts to deliver the Wifi signal and is hooked up to the GSM network. I didn’t do a full blown eval of the battery time. My subjective rating, with no constant operation but multiple startups of the device, would be an operating time of 2.5 hours per charge. Enough for a vacation, for business use I might require a longer battery.

I mailed MobilX, the shop where I bought the MiFi, about the problem. So far they responded that I should send back the whole set and it will take them 2-3 weeks for a repair / return. As I have some trips ahead and I’m allready hooked to the device, this currently is no feasible approach for me. I have to reach out to them and see if there is any other solution. I’ll keep you posted.

[Update 1]

Approached mobilX again regarding the necessary repair. As the problem seems to be with the charger, they now asked me to mail in only the charger. Did this today. Now I’m waiting for any further processing.

[/Update]

[Update 2]

mobilX replaced the charger fairly fast. It took them roughly a week before the replacement part reached me. Unfortunately the charging problem remains. So I’ll have to sent in the complete MiFi unit

.mobilX WebSite

[Update 2]

Overall a positive experience. I highly recommend the MiFi.

- PTL -


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My thoughts on the rumored Apple Tablet [Updated]

30 07 2009

For a while I’m following these rumors and combined them with some of my thoughts. Baseline of all of my thoughts was, that Apple in the past never reached for the bleeding edge technology, but more for the proven, state of the art technology nicely wrapped. Plus all speculation should be tied to the market Apple might be targeting.

The Basics

Baseline to all rumors is, that there will be some kind of Apple Tablet Device. There seems to be an outstanding order for 10 inch touch displays that need to be linked to a device. Price range for this device is estimated around US$ 800-1’000.

AppleInsider Picture

For this price point this would be no Macbook Tablet or anything similar. Apple won’t cannibalize Macbook sales.  So we should expect more of a iPhone / iPod Touch XL or DX kind of device. Comparing the capability of today’s netbooks to the new Apple device it must be capable of web browsing, instant messaging and email processing. The building blocks for this plus the touch interface are already available with the current iPhone / iPod Touch 3.0 OS. So no surprises here. The “Apple tax” could be justified with the touch interface, plus superb build quality and the Apple logo.

3G or 4G network besides WLAN ? 

This is a tough one. Depending on target market for this device my guess differs.

If Apple chose to go the traditional way, they might aim for the additional device (aka as Netbook) market. The potential buyer already has an existing WLAN infrastructure at home and for the mobile use a iPhone with tethering is available. This would indicate to no 3G or 4G built into the device.

More groundbreaking could be a totally different market. Target the device to all those consumers, that currently don’t have any direct device access to the Internet. Like e.g. my grandma. This would then definitely require a 3G or 4G network built into the device as these consumer typically don’t have a network infrastructure besides a phone at home. I suspect that this market would be significantly larger. As Apple would define this market segment from scratch, competitors couldn’t get in fast and Apple will play the “simple and easy to use” card. Competition would be unprepared. Plus, as the OS part would be owned by Apple, it will take time to build something comparable on other platforms.

If the device will have a carrier based network on board, this will be a 3G version. LTE would be too new for Apple and only available in very few locations.

Timing

This device will be clearly a leisure / home / private device. A release for this years Christmas season makes sense. Plus the old display rumors with a delivery in Fall indicate in the same direction. Probably we’ll see a similar staged approach as with the iPhone. First get a device out with no or limited third party app support. Parallel to the release a SDK will be published and an App store will open early next year. If Apple chose to enter the

Audio + Video

Some rumors indicate that there might be some extended multimedia functions for this device ranging from enhanced album features to streaming video.

The audio part makes sense for me. This device could be the audio repository at home, nicely selectable song collection enhanced with some web elements and additional album goodies. Playback either via headset, some add-on speaker unit for portable and outdoor use or through streaming to Apple Airport devices.  

I strongly doubt that there will be any kind of extended video or movie capabilities on top of the capabilities the iPod touch / iPhone has today. Storage requirements for a HD video collection would be too high. Additionally some rumors indicate that the major studios haven’t heard about such a device or plans of an extended service.

One more thing?

What else could Apple bring to the table for its tablet device?

  • E-Book Reader: I doubt it, battery live plus display technology (non ePaper) are against this?
  • Digital Picture Frame: Might be a clever marketing idea. Ingredients are at hand. And it gives the consumer a reason to put the device on display and show it off.
  • Enhanced Mobile Me integration: Clearly yes.
  • AppleTV controller on steroids: Could be, but I don’t see the market. First there needs to be a new version of AppleTV that includes TV recording, full 1080p playback.
  • Games platform: It’s missing too many controls and as the device is too large for easy carry around it would be limited to home use. There other devices are well established plus the tablet input mode doesn’t provide too many interesting ways too interact. It might be, that Apple tries to reinvent the board game. But a 10 inch board game is in many cases too small.This kind of new board game might become interesting with a new target buyer type, that previously didn’t have a computer (again my grandma).

Final Vote

My final vote goes currently to a new consumer device in the category of Web-Tablets. The device will open a new large market segment for Apple without too much competition. For all gadget freaks I fear that this device won’t be overly exciting. But we’ll see….

Just my 2ct….. PTL


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Remote IT support for friends and family – Teamviewer

29 07 2009

For a long time my parents stayed away from PCs. My dad had to work with a PC during his last working years. After retirement I configured a three year old PC (without Internet connection) for the standard word processing tasks. But this system remained mostly untouched. Some 3 years ago the moment came and he called me, that he wanted to get Internet. He didn’t know what it meant, but somehow he wanted to get “it”. As we live some 100 km apart it became clear to me that some “remote support” solution was needed. The phone as medium just wasn’t enough.

In the past I had mostly relied on some kind of VPN connection to remote support. And as up- and downstream speeds got better, this also seemed to be the solution for my dad.

The latest thing that in 2006 came to my attention was a virtual VPN service called Hamachi.

Hamachi Homepage

Basically I prepared another PC for my dad, this time with Microsoft Windows  XP, Office, a Antivirus product and a Hamachi Client plus UltraVNC. I tried to lock down my dads account as much as possible. The VNC daemon was started through a service operation on a admin account. Intentionally dad didn’t get admin privileges.

This solution worked perfectly well for a couple of month and stopped at some point. Sometimes dads system was not online via Hamachi, in other instances I could see that the system was online, but couldn’t log on to VNC. What was originally intended as a solution to support, became more and more a problem in itself. One day it took nearly two hours to get the remote access solution going, while the original problem was solved in two minutes.

So I started to look into other solutions.  Some of my requirements where:

  • Cost effective
  • Transparent  to the network configuration
  • No installation required on the remote systems
  • Simple to initiate on the remote site

I finally came up with Teamviewer which met all the above listed requirements plus its multi-platform, runs on Windows and MacOS. So after my big shift to OSX I can support dad on his Windows systems (He bought a netbook last Dec!) while sitting in front of my Mac.

Teamviever Homepage

Teamviewer is for me currently the remote support solution. So far it had no issues with the underlying network. Even connections via HSDPA worked pretty well. Plus it doesn’t require any installation on the remote side. I just send out the link to the client and my dad or my friends just download the latest version of the app, start it and tell me the necessary codes to log in. I hope that they’ll provide an iPhone admin console soon, so that I can help even while on the road.

-PTL-


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