05-FEB-2008

No more complaints about the lack of WiFi, not even in the train. JoikuSpot is a Symbian S60v3 software that turns your WiFi equipped telephone into a WiFi hot spot - offering internet access trough 3G/GPRS to any WiFi device nearby.

The www.joikuspot.com website does not inspire much confidence, looking a bit like a link farm or a site designed to gather e-mails for spam, but I guess it is a genuine company and the site just suffers from a unfortunate design. The software itself is good, it is extremely simple but does exactly what you expect. You start the software, choose how the phone should connect to the internet now you have an open WiFi hot spot that other devices such as the iPod Touch can use.

If you just need to connect your laptop the the net, it makes more sense to use Bluetooth to access your phone and use it as a 3G/GPRS modem since Bluetooth uses much less power while WiFi drains your batteries. But if you have a device without Bluetooth but with WiFi, then JoikuSpot is a great (read only) solution. Such devices include the Sony PSP, iPhone Touch and digital pocket cameras with WiFi or the Eye-Fi SD card. Of course, if these devices had Bluetooth to begin with, we wouldn't have this problem that JoikuSpot now tries to fix.

Unfortunately, Eye-Fi is one of the WiFi devices that doesn't seem to be working with JokuSpot, perhaps Eye-Fi is designed not to use Ad-hoc WiFi connections (as opposed to "infrastructure" connections offered by ordinary WiFi base stations). JoikuSpot would have been a great companion for the Eye-Fi - just start JokuSpot, place the phone in your belt and start snapping photos while you are on the move and photos will be published as you go. Sure, it will be a bit slow but that is better than no connectivity. Hopefully Eye-Fi and/or JoikuSpot will be able to overcome this problem and get this to work.