PDANet and FoxFi combine to make life easy

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on June 4th, 2012

More and more hotels are offering free WiFi. It is often spotty or, on rare occasions, unworkable. And occasionally, we’ll stay at a hotel that charges! (Or, they’ll charge for it in your room, and offer it for free in a common area, usually far away from your room!)

We blogged once in the past about PDANet— an inexpensive bit of software from JuneFabrics that enables you to access the internet by tethering your notebook, netbook or laptop to your Android phone and connecting to the WWW via the 3G network. It’s stable, it delivers as promised (in our experience) and, like we said, it makes life easier.

We discovered another bit of (Free!) software that makes life even easier– FoxFi. We downloaded it onto our Droid 3 phone and fired it up and it immediately allowed us to access the internet (again, via Verizon’s 3G network)… but wirelessly!

It turns your phone into an internet hotspot! Some of you might be saying, “I am a Verizon subscriber and I can turn my Droid phone in to a hotspot already!” Ah, but you must pay a monthly fee to Verizon! We think that’s pretty crappy that Verizon doesn’t just let you use your fancy smart phone as a hotspot without extracting even more cash out of you, but we dealt with it. Then, while sniffing around online for a way to use PDANet on our Viewsonic G-Tab, we saw mention of FoxFi on a Droid forum. At first, we didn’t believe that it was real… or perhaps the user describing it was mistaken… it seemed too good to be true! A free app that turns your Droid into a hotspot and gets around Verizon’s charges? No way!

Way!

With a phone in one hand and the G_Tab in the other (while standing in the back of the house at a recent gig), we downloaded the app, fired up both devices and– Bingo!– we were surfing the internet on the tablet, with the smartphone in our pocket!

We’re using it right now. Two netbooks are online via one hard-working Droid. Awesome.

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