Saturday 7 May 2011

iPhone tethering test

So having got hold of an iPad 2 recently I decided to my put my iPhone 4’s Personal Hotspot capability to the test. So as I was chauffeured around the streets of London last night I had a solid hour and bits worth of surfing on my iPad. And it worked like a dream web pages opened nice and speedily, I streamed video from YouTube and Cnet without issue and having such a large screen with a map on it made it far better than a small Tomtom at navigating the side streets of London to get around the horrid traffic leading up to Piccadilly Circus.

In that short period I went through about only 30MB of sent and received data but the battery hit was enormous, having left home with 46% my phone was down to 16% at the end of my trip. So now I need to invest a in a good car charger as the iPod port in the car will not charge any of the iDevices that do not support firewire charging.

As always check with your service provider with regards to cost but with Vodafone charging just £5 for 500MB my non 3G iPad 2 will be getting a lot of outdoor use. And remember you can tether up to three devices via Wifi and a further two by Bluetooth. It goes without saying with that many devices data speeds will be spread extremely thin between all clients.

The only real drawback is that you cannot share a Wifi connection only a cellular data one. I have often been to hotels where you have to pay per device and it would have been nice to pay for just one device and have the others use that as a access point.

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