WalkingHotSpot software morphs your smartphone into WiFi router {Engadget Mobile}

Sep 11th 2008 8:08PM Heh, WMWifiRouter ( http://www.wmwifirouter.com/ ) and JoikuSpot ( http://www.joikuspot.com ) - and I think PDANet ( http://www.junefabrics.com/pdanet/ ) does this now too - have been doing this for a long time now, I've been following their progress closely for quite a while now, as well as WalkingHotSpot's.

As somebody above already posted (you can make it out from the link), the very first release of WMWifiRouter was in November of 2007 and came from the PPC hacker community. That's almost half a year before WalkingHotSpot even made their first announcement - Joiku was also already around by then (January 2008, I think), and PDANet has been around like forever (though not offering the wifi thing and requiring a seperate application on the client).

Also, neither of the others are a subscription service (and why would it be) ? WMWifiRouter offers a lot of options (aside from cell to wifi, also things like usb to wifi and in reverse, bluetooth, etc - and lots of advanced configuration stuff for the real geek) and very good support.

Besides, look at what the WalkingHotSpot guys have done. They see two companies already make a cool app - Joiku and WMWifiRouter - and try to steal the idea. Now I can somewhat agree with 'better stolen right than badly thought of', but how they continue makes it worse. The first thing they try to do is sell it to providers with the option for the providers to disable or limit it's usage for the end-user. Now they find they could not get the carriers to work with them, they offer it to consumers directly, but still limit the users by being a subscription service and limiting the number of devices. Also I've noticed that the 1.20 release of WMWifiRouter was today, and this was widely known to all who were interested. Is it a coincidence they released this press release now as well? I think not - and their release seems very rushed - you can't even download the WalkingHotSpot trial, or at least I haven't been able to.

Seems to me like they want you to try it out for a few days, make you think 'ah thats nice, I may need that sometime', so then you order it for a month. Then you start to use it more, and you will pay the annual license because, hey, you use it often cause it's a good idea. By then you will have payed more than for JoikuSpot, WMWifiRouter or PDANet, for less features, and being artificially limited.

Do you really want to be a customer to a company that employes those tactics? I sure wont. (Yeah, I do own copies of both WMWifiRouter and JoikuSpot)

And you know what the worst thing is.. you mister poster present this as something new, while Joiku, PDANet and WMWifiRouter have been around quite a while now and worst... Engadget Mobile has posted about these several times!