I have been trialing JoikuSpot over the last couple of days as the concept looks great. JoikuSpot turns your wifi enabled 3g Nokia phone into a wifi hotspot. This allows wifi enabled but crucially non-phone devices to connect easily to the internet. So for example the browsing experience on a iPod Touch is great but it can only get access through a wifi connection. Similarly the Asus EEE PC only has wifi and no bluetooth, although that is pretty simple to add. In both cases they can easily search out and connect to wifi hotspots. So with JoikuSpot you can connect to your phone via wifi and use the 3g connection.

OK, so much for the theory. In practice things are a little different. The software installed without any problems on my Nokia E61. Starting it is easy enough and you get sufficient feedback to know that it has initiated. I then tried to connect via my iPod Touch. This instantly saw my phone (listed as JoikuSpot_00119FFA55…) and connected. I then opened up a web page and was impressed with the speed - however, then I got my first problem. After 30 seconds or so the connection was dropped and I wasn’t able to reconnect without stopping and starting JoikuSpot. This pattern repeat on all the occasions I tried it. I then tried from my Asus EEE PC and while it was able to see the network it was never able to connect. A quick look at the logs indicated that there was a problem getting a DHCP lease. At this point I gave up.

JoikuSpot is a great idea and once it it out of beta and has ironed out the kinks in its service it is going to be great. In the meantime I am going to wait until I get my Nokia N96 before I try again as it is, allegedly, more stable on this platform. Then I look forward to easy surfing wherever I am.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Mobile Working. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.