Here’s a thought…
My Nokia E61 can be used as a 3G modem via its Bluetooth connection. The very popular Nokia N95 does the same. But they also have WiFi. I wonder if it would be possible to create software that would allow them to become WiFi routers? I don’t know enough about the radio hardware involved to know whether this is viable. I fear not, or somebody would have done it by now.
Lots of interesting devices now have WiFi – the iPhone, the iPod Touch, the Nintendo DS… Just imagine if I could just switch on my pocket WiFi basestation and give them all 3G connectivity. That would be exceedingly cool.
What’s the nearest I can get to this – anybody know?
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Well, I suppose you’re not happy with a single dial-up Bluetooth connection? As far as I can tell there’s no easy access to the IP stack and/or a way to do NAT on a Nokia, but I once (for a laugh) got a simple socket proxy running in Python on the E90.
Was an infernal pain, though. Still, it might be possible to do SOCKS…
Oh, another thing: Google “Option Globesurfer”. It’s not pocketable, but I brought along one for my vacation – they’re up to 7.2 Mbps HSDPA 😉
Hi Rui –
Well, the Bluetooth works OK, and it gives me nice 3G connectivity from my MacBook, (which is the only reason I use an E61 instead of a Blackberry).
But most of the smaller devices, like the iPod Touch, don’t have Bluetooth but do have wiifi. So they can connect to something which looks like a router without any hardware or software changes And if I could get the E61 to do NAT then I could connect the Mac the same way, which would be easier than Bluetooth.
I can do this at the moment by connecting over Bluetooth using the Mac and then sharing the connection to nearby devices over wifi. It would just be very cool if I could do it without needing a laptop in the middle!
The open source snob in me would probably attempt something with the OpenMoko/Neo1973. This sort of routing is next to trivial in Linux and other Unix-like OSs.
http://www.jongma.org/WMWifiRouter/
“WMWifiRouter is a tool to use your Windows Mobile 6 (possibly 5) as a WiFi GPRS/UMTS/HSPA router. It’ll allow you to use WiFi capable devices to connect to the internet through your phone’s data connection.”
Cool! Too bad it’s Windows Mobile…
Here here. I see you’re trying joikuspot. If it works I might finally put up with the UI latency and get an S60 phone.
Lorenzo – it works, sort of – definitely very alpha at the moment. I have great hopes.
I think it will, eventually, be useful. At the moment it’s an interesting gimmick…