wifi finder that's good

[gazznsam]

2nd question in as many minutes

got an E70, i chose it for the wifi and the qwerty keyboard, so i could get my e-mails for free and maybe search things about the town im in when i am touring europe, and find a wifi spot i can use, stuff i'd have used the pocket pc for, but i want to cut down on the ammount of expensive electronic gadgets i have in my pockets.

but the built in wifi finder on the E70 is a bit naff, it seems to have a refresh rate of 1 minute, that's be ok for a desktop computer, but not for something that is designed and sold to be used whilst your mobile,

i've read somewhere there are a couple of free wifi finder apps for this phone, one of them is that psiloc, which is still naff, as it's minimum search time is still 1 minute,

but i can't find the other wifi finders now i want one, on my laptop i use 'wirelessmon' it's really a wardriving app. but it cab be set to scan every millisecond if you want, gives a list of all hot spots found, shows if they are open or enxrypted, signal strength and so on, and allows you to connect with one click,

that's what i want for the phone, because once i've found a wifi spot, i want to be able to find the optimum place to be to get a good signal, at home there are loads of dead spots for our home wifi, and the nokia wifi finder is useless to let me locate a good spot, as it'd take me days to find them having to wait a minute between scans.


Any suggestions?

[wouterk]

Hi,
there is one which I've installed which is called: HandyWi.
It is freeware and can be downloaded at www.handywi.com
Wouter

[elp]

Originally Posted by gazznsam

got an E70, i chose it for the wifi and the qwerty keyboard, so i could get my e-mails for free and maybe search things about the town im in when i am touring europe, and find a wifi spot i can use, stuff i'd have used the pocket pc for, but i want to cut down on the ammount of expensive electronic gadgets i have in my pockets.

In my experience, relying on wifi to get an internet connection while traveling in Europe just doesn't work. Or at least it didn't work for me. Over the last year and a half I've traveled quite a lot with my E61 and then E90 (both wifi enabled) in Ireland, the UK, Germany and France (just back from Paris in fact) and finding a free wifi hotspot that works is generally hopeless.

The vast majority of wifi networks I would find were either secure or not free requiring you to pay stupid prices to get an hour online. In large cities, I often found myself surrounded with half a dozen of unsecured wifi networks. The problem there is that they almost always either have some kind of MAC address filtering which means that you won't be able to connect or they are commercial hotspots. The only way to find out is to try them one by one and see, which takes ages. And you generally end up empty handed.

Sometimes, you even find a free hotspot only to realize that even though it's free, you have to register first in the browser after which you get a 20 character password displayed on the browser's screen that you then have to enter manually on a login page before you can actually start using the connection. On a mobile phone, this means that you need to have a piece of paper handy to write down the code and then type it on the phone's keypad. A nightmare.

This whole wifi-on-the-go hype is in my opinion just that: a big hype. At least it is in western europe.

[gazznsam]

must admit i've had better luck than you whilst abroad, tho it does depend on where you are in europe.

In germany, i've never not been able to get online with wifi, yes there are lots of thses public pay wifi spots about, wouldent mind but they charge for one day what a months worth of dsl costs at home,

i've found in germany many town halls (rathaus) have a free wifi spot, you do need to do the log in thing to get an access code, so paper or use notepad on the phone, a faff but better than nowt.

we toured europe in our motorhome, and i was amazed how many times we got 3 things we wanted in one... firstly a place to park the motorhome for a night or 2 (handy as in germany your allowed to park almost anywhere that's not contradicting a parking law)

secondly we wanted a place to park up, and be within reach of an open wifi spot, and thirdly we wanted a place to park, get wifi and be close to a U bahn station in the cities, amazingle we nearly always found all 3!!... that was mainly down to me buying a range maxx usb wifi dongle for hte lappy, and putting it on the end of a 5 meter usb extension cable, so it was located in the skylight on the foor of the motorhome, as the internal wifi wasnt so hot inside an alliminium walled and steel vehicle.

I was amazed that in switzerland we found open wifi spots even more abundant, tho some were obviousely left open by mistake (like industrial estates with half the buisenesses broadcasting open wifi)

france was the most difficult, lots of secured ones, but we did manage to find enough open ones to get our e-mails,

one nice thing about germany, i was finding more and more hotspots with an ssid of 'free public wifi' i'd found a few 2 years ago and thought they were just a fad, but this time we found them on quite a few occasions in different cities and big towns,

but i still havent found a proggy for symbian that works like wirelessmon on the laptop,
they all seem to have a 1 minute minimum re-scan time, wireless mon can go down to 0.01 seconds,

maybe wireless mon can be ported to symbian or something? not holding my breath tho.