JoikuSpot Light is an awesome piece of freeware which allows you to tether your mobile phone’s 3G capabilities and turn it into a wi-fi hotspot. Bascially, it gives you a dead-simple way to connect your laptop or pc to internet via cell phone.
Not only does this mean you’ve got a wi-fi hotspot in your pocket - this also means you have less hardware to lug around if you want to use your laptop and connect to internet through mobile. No more Bluetooth/Cable/USB dongles. Everything’s now 100% wireless.
Joikuspot currently runs on the Symbian platform, which means it caters for the higher end Nokias (N and E series) as well as a few of Samsung’s higher end phones. Of course, all phones supported share the same criteria which is that the device has to support data transfer (eg. 3G, EDGE, HSDPA, GPRS), and the phone has wi-fi capabilities (needed to broadcast the wi-fi you create).
It’s extremely simple to set up and easy to use. All you need to do is run the program on your phone and voila - instant hotspot. You can even hide the mobile app in the background on your phone as you go about your daily business.
Some of my favorite features include:
Encryption support – Joikuspot is incredibly secure and supports WEP including 128bit key generator for your security. This ensures that you maintain control over who uses the wifi generated from your phone, and to ensure your session is fully secure.
GPS Compatibility – If you feel generous enough to operate your mobile hotspot without a password and you want to share it with the world, Joikuspot allows you to sync up with your GPS (if your phone has one) and broadcast your location to the world on Google Maps.
Battery threshold – This feature shuts down Joikuspot when the battery level is too low. As you can imagine, intensive 3G AND Wifi usage will drain the battery extremely quickly. You can set it up so that it shuts off at a certain battery level so you never have to worry about empty phone batteries when you need to make a call.
Multiple connections – Joikuspot allows you to share your bandwidth with others or multiple devices at the same time so several people can share a single connection.
Auto reconnect – Works in the background to automatically reconnect every time a data connection is lost. This is crucial for a seamless experience.
Joikuspot comes in two different flavors. Joikuspot Light supports HTTP and HTTPS protocols, which is enough to handle most casual users covering basic browsing, web based email as well as Instant Messaging. It doesn’t however support some of the more enterprise and businesslike features like Outlook and corporate email.
Joikuspot Premium however supports ALL protocols allowing users to use Outlook, YouTube, Web radio, FTP, VPNs, Skype and other programs requiring specific protocols that practically covers everything anyone would ever want to do on the web.
The premium edition costs 25 Euros ($35) once off (which is incidentally still cheaper than paying for wireless laptop broadband), and also has special bulk licensing options for corporate use, but for most users (like me) – the free light edition is good enough.
This software has also been making waves in the international arena having recently been voted by Forum Nokia as 2008’s Star Developer, an award handed out to recognize the most unique and innovative applications developed for mobile phones based on the Symbian OS.
Of course before you use this to turn your cell phone as a wireless modem, ensure that you’re on an unlimited data plan because the data usage is understandably intense for this application. As for me, I wirelessly hooked up my iPod touch to my phone, so I’ve now got a device which gives me the internet experience of an iPhone 3G… at a third of the price.
