Posted on April 27, 2010
Eye-Fi announced today that their new X2 cards are being upgraded with Easy WiFi! If you don’t know Eye-Fi, they make super cool SD storage cards for digital cameras which contains a WiFi chip that can automatically upload your photos to the web. What this means for users is that they can now upload their pictures all over the world, at the many hundreds of Easy WiFi Network locations! Imagine being able to share your photos quickly, have “endless storage” because your card is never full, and have a web backup in case you lose your camera. The Eye-Fi card does all that! We’re very excited to be working with Eye-Fi. Aside from a great product, it’s an amazing example of what Easy WiFi can do. An SD card is a challenging environment to say the least – despite the lack of UI and limited resources, Easy WiFi still allows the X2 card to access a world of WiFi automatically. Congrats to our partners at Eye-Fi for this groundbreaking new product! Learn more at eye.fi.
Posted on June 18, 2009
We’re finding out a little more now, especially the reason why some people are not seeing any problem running the Easy Wi-Fi apps under iPhone OS 3.0. [Check out the MacWorld article about the new login capabilities of iPhone OS 3.0.] We’ve also found a case where the app can still be useful even without that workaround, so several of the Easy Wi-Fi apps will be returning to the store today as free apps! We’ll try to keep this blog updated with what we learn, as we learn it (within the limitations of any non-disclosure agreements). Re-authentication On the AT&T network we have noticed that depending on what you do once connected, you can be pretty quickly timed-out. In that case, when you try to access the web you’ll get the regular login form, and, of course, other apps like email just fail. You can make the built-in authentication work again by turning Wi-Fi off and back on, but you can also just launch Easy Wi-Fi to handle the re-authentication for you. We’re assuming that this will also be true on other networks where the access controller times out the client devices when they’re idle without actually forcing them to…
Posted on June 17, 2009
The Good News Today’s release of the iPhone OS 3.0 has added what is really two new features that will benefit public Wi-Fi users: Automated login to any carrier provided Wi-Fi networks (e.g. all of AT&T’s Wi-Fi locations here in the US); An integrated mechanism for logging in to other public Wi-Fi networks via a web form. Obviously, iPod touch users don’t benefit from the carrier network feature (they don’t have a carrier!), but they do get the integrated web form login mechanism. The Bad News As with the good news above, there are two bits of bad news here too: The integrated mechanism, at least for me, does not remember what I entered, forcing me to retype the information each time. The new autofill button is always unavailable even though I have the feature turned on in the Safari settings. When this form fails, or when you tap cancel to skip it, rather than leaving you connected the OS disconnects from the Wi-Fi network. That prevents you from using a third party smart-client like Devicescape’s Easy Wi-Fi. Disappointed Given that our apps are unable to serve their purpose in this new version of the OS, we took the difficult…
Posted on April 15, 2009
Here at Devicescape HQ, we’re hard at work preparing our next software release for S60 handsets. We’re not quite ready to share it with the whole world yet, but we’d like to show it to some of our more technical users to get their feedback and suggestions. If you’re interested in helping us design new features and make our product better, leave us a comment and we’ll email you back with setup instructions.
Posted on March 26, 2009
Having a user base in excess of one million enthusiastic members gives us a great opportunity to query the habits, desires, and problems facing Wi-Fi users today. With that in mind, we’ve decided to conduct regular surveys of our membership, where we can ask insightful questions of this leading-edge community. We plan to conduct the survey quarterly, and publish the results in a piece of original research that we call “The Devicescape Wi-Fi Report”. Catchy huh? 😉 We conducted our first survey in January and have now published the first Devicescape Wi-Fi report for Q1, 2009. Some of the things we learned were quite surprising, while others simply confirmed what we already knew. Here’s a sample of what we learned: Most users want Muni Wi-Fi and (surprise!) they’d be willing to pay for it like a utility Most users prefer Wi-Fi to 3G and want it built into all phones and bundled with cellular plans People like iPhone Wi-Fi best while on the road (no surprise!) Now that the first one is done, we’re working hard on the Q2 report. We plan on probing more deeply and hope to invite our friends in the industry to participate through crafting good…
Posted on October 30, 2008
Yesterday AT&T finally announced the free Wi-Fi access for their iPhone customers in the US. That opens up the Wi-Fi networks in Starbucks, McDonald’s and many other places to iPhone users, giving them high speed access from their phones while they sip coffee or enjoy a their lunch. Using Wi-Fi is much better than EDGE (as those of us with first generation iPhones, or who live in areas that don’t yet have 3G coverage can confirm), but it is also usually faster and more reliable than the 3G network as long as you have a strong signal. Unfortunately, the official AT&T way to get this free access involves jumping through hoops each time you want to connect in a new location. Assuming you have the attwifi SSID already in your preferred networks list (i.e. you’ve connected to it once before, and not told the iPhone to forget the network), then you will need to do this: Fire up mobile Safari and load a page so that you get the special iPhone captive portal page. Enter your 10-digit mobile number and check the box to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy. Tap ‘continue’. Wait for a (free) text message from AT&T…
