In their Circuits section, the New York Times overloads us with wireless articles today. Here's a few that caught
our eye about "Wireless Living":
Review of mobile video on
small-screened cellphones.
Discussion of form and function on
increasingly small cellphones.
7 reasons why you can't log on to that
local Wi-Fi hotspot.
How your car merges with your
cellphone directory.
This niche blog has now been merged into the The Wireless Report (www.thewirelessreport.com), which covers all things wireless.
1. The Wi-Fi article is weak to say the least. He claims 7 obstacles, but some are exceptionally contrived, like number 2 (not having a home page on your browser so you don't automatically get the hotspot login page at commercial hotspots) or number 7 (a very specific 'closed' network at a station in Boston that is there to provide information about the station itself and nothing else).
Then there's number 4 (prompting for a password) which would overcome obstacles 1 & 2 (where you have to enter the password using a browser). The username & password of course could go away with certificate usage, or SIM cards etc, but people are familiar with username & password, so I suspect it will be around for a while.
All in all a rather disappointing article that seems to be spreading the belief that wireless networking will be hard, and non-techie people should avoid it. That's a shame because it doesn't need to be (just buy a Mac and you'll see how easy it can be to get online wirelessly pretty much anywhere).
Posted at 5:25AM on Dec 19th 2005 by John