in Applications, Innovation, Mobile Phones

Turn Your Mobile Phone In A Mobile WiFi Access Point.

Sometimes it happens to read some really cool idea developed by some crazy coder.20080111WMWifiRouter.jpg

We have started to see a lot of mobile phone equipped with WiFi and lot of them are running an open Operating System like Windows Mobile or Symbian.

The idea here is quite simple but extremely powerful.

From one side you have your broadband mobile data connection (even better if you are sitting on an HSPA wireless network) and on the other side you have a WiFi  chipset sitting on the very same mobile phone.

Why not letting the mobile phone act as a WiFi access point and route data to the internet through the mobile broadband data connection? Just easy as that.

You could then use your phone to connect to the internet all of your WiFi enabled devices. This is extrememly powerful.

All you need is:

  • Windows Mobile 5 – SmartPhone Edition or PocketPC (with phone functionality) Edition OR
  • Windows Mobile 6 – Standard or Professional (NOT Classic!)
  • A WiFi connection on your device
  • A (cellular) data connection on your device
  • Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) installed (and working) on your device

Those are very simple requirements to fullfill for most of existing Windows Mobile enabld mobile phone.

I think that the main issues here are that you need to know very well how much your data plan is costing to you. You may easily find yourself with hundreds of megabytes moved around in minutes. The other issue that I see here is that there is does not seem to be any kind of wireless security implemented. From what I have understood the application will set up an open ad-hoc wireless connection. I think that at least they should implement an Access Control List (Even if we well know that faking a MAC Address is very very easy) and some kind of encryption. (At least WPA).

The name of the product is WMWiFiRouter and the developer says that it is still under heavy development in these days.

You may download the application clicking here and you can read a brief installation tutorial here.

Unfortunately the application does not seem to have a Symbian equivalent. That would have been fantastic.

The best part of this is that it is completely free. Go for it, it’s a great idea.

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