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Using WiFi to browse the web on your mobile device has its benefits, but it also comes with added steps. You have to navigate to your communications manager, turn on WiFi, exit, and start Opera Mobile. Then you have to exit Opera and turn off WiFi when you’re finished. That day has come to an end, at least for those of us who haven’t figured out a workaround yet.

A member on XDA-developers has created a tool that cuts out all the extra menu navigating and screen pressing by turning on WiFi and launching Opera Mobile in one click.

Here’s what SmartLauncher does:

- Activates WiFi & connects to preferred access point
- Shows connection strength, IP, SSID name and authentication mode
- Launches Opera browser with the same button that enables WiFi
- Turns off WiFi when done

I feel like I’m already using WiFi more than I used to, thanks to this simple tool.

Note: currently, it’s still in beta and only works for devices where OperaL.exe is in the windows directory. It was developed for the Touch Diamond2, but I can confirm that it works on the Touch Pro as well.

I have to admit, as much of a gadget geek as my friends perceive me to be, I don't use WiFi on Windows Mobile because the setup just feels clunky and confusing, although if I tried I am sure I can be online in little to no time. On the other hand, get ready to gasp, if I need to search for something quickly or browse the net, I usually reach for my iPhone if I am at home, hop onto my WiFi network, and surf away.

The iPhone's and iPod Touch's WiFi ease of use seems to be paying off. According to Electronista, the latest survey shows that the two devices combined account for 78.6% of mobile WiFi traffic in the US and UK. Compare this with some HTC devices--the Shadow, the Wing on T-Mobile, and the G1--which each got 0.8%.

Those with HTC, non-carrier devices, especially the newer ones, know about the ease of popping in a SIM, have a configuration utility pop-up and set up the SIM card for network access no matter where you are in the world. Hopefully, Microsoft and its partners can develop a meaningful WiFi configuration utility that is easier to use and less clunky than common solutions today. With more advanced browsers (Opera Mobile 9.5) and browsing services (SkyFire) on Windows Mobile, users really don't need to power up their desktops or laptops to quickly browse or search for something.

Because the iPhone's Bluetooth implementation is strange in that it doesn't allow external devices, other than a Bluetooth earpiece, to have access to the system, Navigadget is reporting that LocoGPS will be releasing a WiFi implementation of the traditional Bluetooth GPS.

The WiFi GPS receiver will have a microSD slot for maps, and will have its own processor to process data, a WiFi chip, and a GPS receiver.

The device will come with an implementation of iGo 8 pre-loaded for about less than $200.00.

I could see the downside for this being that WiFi draws a lot more power than Bluetooth and the devices may need to be charged more frequently, although I think the iPhone's battery life beats my AT&T Tilt's battery life with WiFi turned on.

Moreover, for people with more than one phone, I am wondering if the LocoGPS WiFi GPS receiver could be used with a Windows Mobile device so that people with a Windows Mobile device and an iPhone wouldn't need to carry around more than one GPS receiver of some sort.

Skype ond Boingo anounced that they are going to provide service for VoIP calls over WiFi hotspots. Along with this two of the major mobile phone manufacturers, Samsung and LG, anounce that they are going to develop phones that combine cellular and WiFi technology.

I think this new initiative can be blessing in disguise for cellular users, but a downfall for carriers. Since WiFi is becoming more and more popular, and hotspots are popping up all over, the cellular carriers will have competition to lower rates as service from Skype takes off. With the service from Skype you pay a monthly fee, but dont have to worry about burning up mobile minutes.

Think about the possibilites that in the near future, we will be able to make calls from a Pocket PC device using a WiFi hotspot to either a mobile phone or a land line, without the worry of having a cellular plan.

"Hitchhiker" helps you to connect your Pocket PC to the wireless Internet. Simply click "Connect" and it will try all nearby public access points. Hitchhiker will handle all settings for you and perform complicated tests to ensure you can connect to the Internet in no time."

If you're into finding public hot spots then you're gonna want to take a look at this cool utility. Its freeware...a big plus..., and allows you to coonect to publicly available, WiFi networks with just a couple taps.

If you give it a shot, please let us know what you think by clicking the, "Discuss This Story" link, and giving us your input!

Mobile Pipeline is reporting a new danger to users who make use of wireless "hot-spots." Apparently some scammers are setting up false hot-spots nearby legitimate hot-spots. These fake hot-spots look like the original, but route the user through a logging program which attempts to capture passwords and other personal data being sent through the network. The fake hot-spots also jam the hot-spot they are pretending to be by using a stronger signal.

This is a real danger to WiFi users both because it is difficult to spot the deception and it is easy for the scammers to set up their "evil twin" hot-spots. This will probably drive hot-spot providers to install extra levels of security, unfortunately with the related extra difficulty in set-up and compatibility issues for the users.

According to a Parks Associates survey of networked households in the U.S., 52% use wireless (WiFi) networks as opposed to about 50% wired Ethernet networks. This is the first time wireless has surpassed wired, but there looks to be a trend toward wireless networks that will continue to tilt the scales in favor of WiFi.

There are a number of reasons why this is the case. The research firm noted that many Internet Service Providers are encouraging their home users to go wireless by bundling inexpensive WiFi components.

An additional reason would be the number of those households that have one or more WiFi-capable laptops or handhelds.

Until the afforementioned streaming-capable DVDs become available, you'll need videos that are formatted for display on your Pocket PC. Pocket PC Media has a nice variety for all tastes, including clips from current news sources. Best of all, for those of you who saw the now-famous LEGO version of "Knights of the Round Table" from the "Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail" DVD, Pocket PC Media has a number of other LEGO videos.

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) has been around for some time now. In fact, VOIP has turned into such a business that California, always in the leading edge of regulation, has decided that VOIP telephony companies will need to have the same licences "land-line" companies do. Wisconsin and Minnesota have made similar decisions. (For more on that topic, see the article at ZDNet UK. With the success of VOIP, it should come as no surprise that people are moving to get Voice Over WiFi working as well.

Symbol Technologies is at work on VOWiFi software that will function a lot like a walkie-talkie (or the push-to-talk functionality of NexTel and Sprint cell phones). The software, called Voice Communicator, should be available in December. Symbol also plans to add voice support to several of its Pocket PC devices with support for VOWiFi coming soon after that.

NEC has plans to announce a voice-enabled PDA within a few weeks. The company also intends to integrate VOWiFi into thier IP PBXs using Airespace Inc.'s WLAN infrastructure equipment.

As with VOIP, to get things truly functioning, you'll need an accepted standard. The IEEE is already working on 802.11e, which will allow mixing and matching voice-enabled WLAN equipment among variousl manufacturers.

One of the great problems in broadband connectivity is the so-called "last mile." It's easy to connect people who are located within the threshold distance from a switching station to DSL. It's easy to connect people within a cable distribution to cable-modem. For people outside those boundaries, there's no easy way to get wireless. That's the reason for a lot of research into high-speed wireless connectivity. This and truly mobile connectivity has also driven cellular companies into the 3rd generation mobile systems that promised high-speed cellular data channels -- something which Europe and Japan have in some extent but is largely lacking in the US and Canada.

The newest entry into wide-area wireless is a system developed by IPWireless in California. The system uses 4th generation TD-CDMA technology as the carrier. Although the CDMA technology was developed for cellular data transfers, IPWireless doesn't connect via cellular phone. It uses a small palm-sized modem which provides throughput up to 15.7Mb/s. In real-life use the throughput is more like 5Mb/s but that still figures well against cable-modem's 3Mb/s and DSL's 1.5Mb/s. IPWireless isn't some theoretical prototype technology either. There are already working installations of the technolgy in Missoula, MT, Jacksonville, FL, San Francisco CA, and even Maui, Hawii.

IPWireless' TD-CDMA also has the capacity to blur the line between traditional broadband providers and traditional cellular providers. It works over a cellular-type wireless infra-structure, but it provides a broadband-type connection off the modem. Either broadband or cellular providers could provide IPWireless hardware and connectivity without conflicting with their traditional services. TD-CDMA is truly data-centric, but, like any broadband connection, you can use Voice Over Internet Protocol to make phone calls.

One thing the advent of this technology shows is how open the wireless connectivity area yet is. Wireless has yet to undergo a major shake-down where one clear standard emerges. The resulting confluence of competing possibilities makes it unwise to simply pick one standard and hope that it survives. The market will favor flexibility and the ability to use multiple connectivity options for some time.

Using WiFi access may be slowing down any network that uses it. That's the finding of some Engineering experts at France's Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. The slowdown is due to the CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance) channel access method (also called "listen before talk"). CSMA/CA waits for each device which "captures" the channel to send a packet before releasing the channel for other traffic. With devices that work at approximately the same speed, this process takes very little time and generally assures that the devices have equal access to the network. If, however, one of the devices is significantly slower, the network waits for the device to finish even though it could process other traffic while it's waiting. The result is that speed is degraded for every device on the network. Most networks operate at 100Mb/s and many now operate at 1Gb/s. When a WiFi device is well within range, the speed is 11Mb/s. In itself that will slow down network speed, but the speed falls to 5, 2, or 1Mb/s when the device gets near to the edge of the WLAN range. A device operating at 1Mb/s on a 1Gb/s network using CSMA/CA will create a major bottleneck.

The CSMA/CA channel access method is part the 802.11a, b, and g standards. That covers all current WLAN technologies. Some hardware has built-in methods of load-balancing or prioritizing traffic in relation to the speed of access but these are proprietary extensions to the standards. A better solution is the 802.11e standard which includes Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms. Unfortunately 11e is still in the standards committees and so, won't be ready for implementation in the near future.

Until an overall solution, like 802.11e, can be implemented, this issue may forestall widespread creation of WiFi hot-spots. Wired users may legitimately complain that their access is degraded by allowing WLAN users.

When Ultra Wide Band (UWB) data transmission was first envisioned, it looked even less like other radio transmissions than it does now. Radio, since it's invention, has used a carrier with the data or voice modifying either it's intensity (AM) or frequency (FM). Modems used the same techniques to transmit data over phone lines. The original UWB design was the first data transmission technique without a carrier. Instead, UWB sent shaped pulses out at any frequency within its vast spectrum. That changed when the IEEE IEEE 802.15.3a committee set the standards for UWB. The new version of UWB has a set of 132 individual carriers at 4 MHz intervals in tight bands 528MHz wide. The UWB allowable spectrum covers 13 bands from 3.4 to 10GHz.

To get that kind of spectrum coverage, it's likely that equipment manufacturers flexible hardware with software to select the configuration of frequencies. That brings up an interesting possiblity: Such flexible hardware could also be programmed to emulate more commonplace radio schemes such as 802.11 a, b, and g WiFi. Further, when future standards emerge, the flexibility of the circuitry will likely be able to meet them.

Glenda Stock, owner of five McDonald's franchises in the Alexandria area, has begun tests to implement Pocket PCs in the ordering process at her restaurants.

"...But now you can get your Big Mac and french fries even more faster thanks to new technology being used by the McDonald's restaurant on Jackson Street Extension. Employees are coming face-to-face with drive-thru customers once again and taking orders using a Pocket PC."

This seems like a great way to increase customer-employee interaction while increasing efficiency. How can you go wrong?

Will anyone really miss placing their orders through those sqawky oversized intercoms?

Sprint PCS and AT&T Wireless are negotiating whether to let each other's Wi-Fi subscribers roam between their two networks of WiFi-based public access points.

The proposed sharing would allow AT&T Wireless customers access to the 2,100 access points that Sprint PCS plans on installing this year.

Sprint PCS executives have been critical of other carriers which provide hotspots, such as T-Mobile, arguing that they are sifting off the wireless market by not allowing for hotspot sharing (through some form of roaming, of course).

Intel and Linksys announced a partnership aimed at making it easier for consumers to use wireless networking technology, as the two companies look to gain a stronger foothold in the emerging market.

This partnering looks further end some of the long-time configuration hassles that had initially plagued wireless networks.

It seems that both companies stand to gain from a partnering such as this-- Linksys for the manufacturing of access points, receivers, bridges, etc. and Intel for developing new processors and technology which are better optimized for WiFi, such as their Centrino chipset.