Joiku launched JoikuSpot Beta earlier this year, the concept of it was simple – it allowed you to turn your Symbian S60 3rd Edition phone into a WiFi hotspot. Brilliant! I tried the initial beta versions and wasn’t massively impressed – great idea, but the software seemed buggy, it didn’t always work and it would only allow http access. Not so good.
A few months passed and Joiku released JoikuSpot Premium, same idea, more features, and a fistful of protocols supported. My experiece of the beta version really put me off considering buying it – even at the discounted price of 14 Euros! I had read online that it was actually very good, and a more solid product than the beta versions. So I took the plunge!
The installation was nice and straight forward and went without incident. Next I had to set it up. You are able to configure the following :
Network Name (SSID),
Access Point – Which connection to use to connect to the Internet eg. o2 Mobile Web.
802.11 Channel – (1,6,11 or Automatic) The Automatic option seems to work well.
Encryption – (None, WEP Open, WEP Shared) Setting either of the WEP options allows further configuration of the Network Key etc.
Battery Threshold – (1-100%) This allows you to set JoikuSpot to stop if the battery drains to a certain level.
Landing Page – (Yes/No) If it is set to ‘Yes’ each time you go online with the software you get taken to a JoikuSpot landing page. ‘No’ will take you to your default home page.
GPS – (Yes/No) This clever setting will us the GPS functionality of your phone to find your location, allowing you to do location based searches on the Landing Page.
Ouside of the Settings the main screen has two tabs ‘Clients’ – which lists those connected to your Access Point. The ‘Status’ tab gives you details of Packets In/Out, Bytes In/Out, Connection Time etc. That is really all there is to it! Simple!
As for using the software day to day, it is a mostly trouble free experience. I’ve owned it for a month now, and been using it on the train with my laptop. It seems to cope well with the O2 Network switching as the train moves, flipping from 2G, EDGE, 3G and 3.5G as well as you’d expect. I’ve had to hit the ‘Reload’ button on the browser once or twice. When you are static it works brilliantly, it isn’t dissimalar to using a regular WiFi connection. Certainly worht the 15 Euro price tag!
As for the negative, well it really does hammer the N95’s battery, using it for a few hours will drain the battery flat. I’m imagining this isn’t the fault of the software moreso the fact the 3G Chip and WiFi Chip within the phone are working overtime! Which in itself creates another problem – HEAT! My poor N95 gets VERY warm after i’ve been using it for a while. Not scolding hold obviously, just more ‘Hmm that doesn’t feel right’ hot!
Still if you are using it for short periods of time you probably wouldn’t really notice either of the above.
It really is a fantastic bit of software that does exactly what it says on the tin. It supports pretty much every protocol going, i’ve http’ed, https’ed, ftp’ed, vpn’ed (you get the idea) with no problems whatsoever. It is priced well (especially with the 40% off offer that Joiku are running) and really is an S60 killer app that i’d recommend to any S60 3rd Ed phone owner who has a laptop and a good data plan.
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