Yesterday AT&T finally announced the free Wi-Fi access for their iPhone customers in the US. That opens up the Wi-Fi networks in Starbucks, McDonald’s and many other places to iPhone users, giving them high speed access from their phones while they sip coffee or enjoy a their lunch. Using Wi-Fi is much better than EDGE (as those of us with first generation iPhones, or who live in areas that don’t yet have 3G coverage can confirm), but it is also usually faster and more reliable than the 3G network as long as you have a strong signal.

Unfortunately, the official AT&T way to get this free access involves jumping through hoops each time you want to connect in a new location. Assuming you have the attwifi SSID already in your preferred networks list (i.e. you’ve connected to it once before, and not told the iPhone to forget the network), then you will need to do this:

1. Fire up mobile Safari and load a page so that you get the special iPhone captive portal page.
2. Enter your 10-digit mobile number and check the box to agree to the Acceptable Use Policy. Tap ‘continue’.
3. Wait for a (free) text message from AT&T containing a link that is only valid at your current location for 24 hours.
4. Switch to the SMS app, and view the link in the text message from AT&T (which will close the SMS app and take you back to Mobile Safari.

That’s a lot of steps just to get some Wi-Fi access! Luckily, Devicescape’s Easy Wi-Fi knows how to get you online using your phone number too. For a simple one-time setup, you get much faster access to the AT&T network:

1. Install the app, tap the ‘My Wi-Fi’ tab to get to the Wi-Fi accounts panel, tap ‘+’ to open the search.
2. Search for iPhone.
3. Choose ‘AT&T Wi-Fi (iPhone)’ from the results and enter your ten digit phone number.

Now, each time you want Wi-Fi at an AT&T location, simply tap the Easy Wi-Fi icon on the iPhone and you’ll be logged in within a few seconds in most cases. No need for SMS messages, no need to enter your phone number each time.

If you have an iPod touch too, then sign up for a Devicescape account, register both devices to it and you can use your iPod touch instead of your iPhone when you’re in the hotspot, leaving your phone free for making calls while you surf (just remember that you can’t connect both at the same time - the accounts only allow a single device to be logged in at a time, and even after logging out on the AT&T network it can take up to 15 minutes for them to allow a different device to get online using the same user name & password).

Hello Everyone,

Those of you with mulitple devices using Devicescape may have noted some inconsistency in our naming convention.  When we first started with the Devicescape automated login product we wanted simply to have the product and the company name be completely consistent.  Hence, “welcome to Devicescape” and “Download Devicescape onto your device”, etc.

Unfortunately we faced naming issues, first on the Nokia devices and next on the iPhone, and ended up deciding to use the “Easy Wi-Fi” product name for those platforms.  Now, with the Easy Wi-Fi application the most popular WiFi app on the Apple App Store (!) and just about every Nokia N and E series phone showing “Easy Wi-Fi” we’ve decided to rationalize all of our products under this name.

It’ll take a month or so to make it through all of our clients and web site, but expect to see Easy Wi-Fi being the consistent name.  Hope you like it!

So, while we’re on this topic, we made a few other changes too.  In line with this mission of making Wi-Fi, well, easy, we’ve decided to consolidate all of our various technologies into one product.  We haven’t yet released it, but this 3.0 version of Devicescape is primarily targeted at our OEM customers: the makers of PCs, handsets and new WiFi capable devices (that’s when the bulk of Devicescape’s business comes from).

We feel that mobility is critical for these types of products, and WiFi will be used in the office, at home, and of course at public networks.  Therefore, our OEM version of Easy Wi-Fi, version 3, will include:

* Our enterprise-class security supplicant
* Optional Cisco CCX support
* Our home consumer oriented, “push-button” Wi-FI Protected Setup
* The automated hotspot login and provisioning system
* A framework to allow integration into the device’s connection manager

There are a bunch of other great enhancements we are making in 3.0, but we’ll disclose those later.