Heading to the Big Smoke any time soon? Don’t forget your smartphone: starting today, Nokia is serving up free Wi-Fi for all in 26 hotspots peppered across central London, and it hopes to open it up in other cities soon. Death to OpenZone!
UPDATE: You can see a list of all the locations after the break.
Ah, the power of speed. Today, Three announced the Huawei E586 MiFi. As the first mobile Wi-Fi device in the UK to support HSPA+ mobile broadband technology, the E586 MiFi will be able to ride Three’s upgraded 21.1Mbps network later this year. Upload speeds are set at 5.76 Mbps (HSUPA) and this bad boy even has a microSD card slot which supports up to 32GB cards.
Beyond the blistering fast speeds and storage options, the Huawei E586 MiFi has a horde of other features. Firstly, there’s an OLED display on the front of the unit which displays key information like the amount of data used, speed of the current connection, length of browsing time and dashboard for viewing SMS and changing settings. Compared to other MiFi units, the display alone is enough to win our hearts.
A new partnership between Nintendo UK and The Cloud will allow 3DS users to access more than 5,000 Wi-Fi hotspots for free. Starting today all of The Cloud’s access points will allow 3DS owners to access content via the Nintendo SpotPass service, access the Nintendo eShop or browse the Internet. Nintendo also took the opportunity to call out the PlayStation Vita during the announcement, “this is what Wi-Fi offers compared to a technology such as 3G, which struggles to handle really rich, data-hungry video content.”
Whether the iPad 2, Galaxy Tab 10.1 or any of two dozen Android tablets is to blame in anyone’s guess. What we do know is that the Motorola Xoom is far from the success many had expected. Reports have surfaced this morning showing the Wi-Fi only 32GB model is due for a price cut, down from $599 to $499 in the US. Is a similar cut coming to the UK?
Most of us use it every day without a second thought, but did you know Wi-Fi is the invention of one of the biggest stars of 1940’s Hollywood? One of the world’s most beautiful women, Hedy Lamarr was at the centre of controlling husbands, arms dealers, Nazis, and Hollywood fame. Her life had more twists and turns than one of her movies – read on for her amazing story, and to find out how her legacy extends to Half-Life 2.
Three has unleashed an army of human hotspots on the nation’s capital today, and will be following up with human Wi-Fi days across the rest of the country in the coming weeks, a welcome antidote to Wi-Fi NotSpots, the failure rates for which we’ve just revealed.
It’s day three of our Say No to Wi-fi NotSpots campaign, and already we’re getting responses left right and centre. If you’re fed up of paying for Wi-fi that doesn’t work, show your love for the campaign over on the Facebook Group. Here’s a roundup of what we’ve heard so far…
Fancy updating your Facebook status with “…is using Wi-Fi on the Tube LOL”? Well from next week you can do so without fibbing, because London Underground is switching on its first wireless hotspot next Monday, 1 November.
