iRiver announced today that they are using Easy WiFi to provide global hotspot connectivity for their eBook readers!  The announcement showed the iRiver Story as a first recipient.

Of course eReaders are just one category of emerging WiFi devices, but a good one for Easy WiFi.  The devices typically don’t include web browsers and need to be simple for all types of people to use.  Manually logging into public networks is so incredibly painful it’s doubtful users would really subject themselves to it.

Easy WiFi gives iRiver’s users the capability to choose the WiFi providers they want, and be logged in automatically.  And, since Easy WiFi supports thousands of providers all over the world, iRiver get a single solution for a global market.

Eye-Fi announced today that their new X2 cards are being upgraded with Easy WiFi!  If you don’t know Eye-Fi, they make super cool SD storage cards for digital cameras which contains a WiFi chip that can automatically upload your photos to the web.

What this means for users is that they can now upload their pictures all over the world, at the many hundreds of Easy WiFi Network locations!  Imagine being able to share your photos quickly, have “endless storage” because your card is never full, and have a web backup in case you lose your camera.  The Eye-Fi card does all that!

We’re very excited to be working with Eye-Fi.  Aside from a great product, it’s an amazing example of what Easy WiFi can do.  An SD card is a challenging environment to say the least - despite the lack of UI and limited resources, Easy WiFi still allows the X2 card to access a world of WiFi automatically.

Congrats to our partners at Eye-Fi for this groundbreaking new product!  Learn more at eye.fi.

We’re finding out a little more now, especially the reason why some people are not seeing any problem running the Easy Wi-Fi apps under iPhone OS 3.0. [Check out the MacWorld article about the new login capabilities of iPhone OS 3.0.]

We’ve also found a case where the app can still be useful even without that workaround, so several of the Easy Wi-Fi apps will be returning to the store today as free apps!

We’ll try to keep this blog updated with what we learn, as we learn it (within the limitations of any non-disclosure agreements).

Re-authentication

On the AT&T network we have noticed that depending on what you do once connected, you can be pretty quickly timed-out. In that case, when you try to access the web you’ll get the regular login form, and, of course, other apps like email just fail. You can make the built-in authentication work again by turning Wi-Fi off and back on, but you can also just launch Easy Wi-Fi to handle the re-authentication for you.

We’re assuming that this will also be true on other networks where the access controller times out the client devices when they’re idle without actually forcing them to disconnect from the Wi-Fi layer. Please let us know your experiences.

The Good News

Today’s release of the iPhone OS 3.0 has added what is really two new features that will benefit public Wi-Fi users:

1. Automated login to any carrier provided Wi-Fi networks (e.g. all of AT&T’s Wi-Fi locations here in the US);
2. An integrated mechanism for logging in to other public Wi-Fi networks via a web form.

Obviously, iPod touch users don’t benefit from the carrier network feature (they don’t have a carrier!), but they do get the integrated web form login mechanism.

The Bad News

As with the good news above, there are two bits of bad news here too:

1. The integrated mechanism, at least for me, does not remember what I entered, forcing me to retype the information each time. The new autofill button is always unavailable even though I have the feature turned on in the Safari settings.
2. When this form fails, or when you tap cancel to skip it, rather than leaving you connected the OS disconnects from the Wi-Fi network. That prevents you from using a third party smart-client like Devicescape’s Easy Wi-Fi.

Disappointed

Given that our apps are unable to serve their purpose in this new version of the OS, we took the difficult decision to remove them from sale in the App Store last night. That’s very disappointing for us as we’ve been ardent supporters of the iPhone platform since the beginning. We had a version of our app for jailbroken phones long before the SDK was ever announced. We even demoed that version to the iPhone management team at Apple to illustrate how important we felt public Wi-Fi access would become for the iPhone and iPod touch devices.

While we are obviously disappointed that our apps have been disabled by this new release, we’re also hopeful that the message about the importance of public Wi-Fi has been understood at Apple. Hotspot login clients are not as simple to write as one might think at first glance, especially not ones that must support thousands of different networks. It has taken us several years to get to the point where we can connect to that many networks, and even now there are still some networks that surprise us with a new trick.

The Future

For Devicescape, the fact that we don’t have an opportunity to help our valued users connect to their preferred hotspots effortlessly is frustrating. But, we’re not giving up on the iPhone platform! Far from it in fact. We have been working very hard since we discovered the problem to find out how we can re-enable our apps, and as soon as we can make them valuable again they will come back onto the store. We also have new features in the works, ironically enabled by the 3.0 version of the OS, that will make them even better.

In closing, we’d like to thank our iPhone and iPod touch users for their support to date, and ask you to hang on to your apps while we sort out what we can and cannot do in this new 3.0 world. We have big plans for our applications on all our platforms, and while we’re temporarily out of the App Store, we will be back. We’d also love to hear from you about your experiences with the Wi-Fi in the new OS, either via the comments here on the blog or through our forum.

Here at Devicescape HQ, we’re hard at work preparing our next software release for S60 handsets.  We’re not quite ready to share it with the whole world yet, but we’d like to show it to some of our more technical users to get their feedback and suggestions.  If you’re interested in helping us design new features and make our product better, leave us a comment and we’ll email you back with setup instructions.

Having a user base in excess of one million enthusiastic members gives us a great opportunity to query the habits, desires, and problems facing Wi-Fi users today.  With that in mind, we’ve decided to conduct regular surveys of our membership, where we can ask insightful questions of this leading-edge community.  We plan to conduct the survey quarterly, and publish the results in a piece of original research that we call “The Devicescape Wi-Fi Report”.  Catchy huh?

We conducted our first survey in January and have now published the first Devicescape Wi-Fi report for Q1, 2009.  Some of the things we learned were quite surprising, while others simply confirmed what we already knew.  Here’s a sample of what we learned:

• Most users want Muni Wi-Fi and (surprise!) they’d be willing to pay for it like a utility
• Most users prefer Wi-Fi to 3G and want it built into all phones and bundled with cellular plans
• People like iPhone Wi-Fi best while on the road (no surprise!)

Now that the first one is done, we’re working hard on the Q2 report.  We plan on probing more deeply and hope to invite our friends in the industry to participate through crafting good questions and help promote Wi-Fi issues exposed in the report.  Anyone can make use of the Report, provided that they refer back to Devicescape and don’t sell the data.

If you’re interested in reading more, check out the Devicescape Wi-Fi report at devicescape.com/wifi_report …and do get in touch if you’re interested in participating in future reports.

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).

I’m excited to announce the availability of Devicescape for iPhone and iPod Touch on Apple’s App Store.  Thanks to all of our users out there who have been so patient: it took us a lot longer than we thought to figure out how to make this release!

As you can see in this screen shot, the new version looks quite a bit different.  Because of Apple’s current limitations on running in the background you need to launch the app to login.  But you can manage your account and check your usage history directly, which I think is quite handy.

If you’d like to check out the application, search for “Easy WiFi” on iTunes  or download it directly from the App Store.

It became official last week - the Devicescape application is now available on Nokia Nseries phones right from the Download! folder. This means even more people worldwide will be able to use the great Devicescape auto-Wi-Fi connect service and all the other great Devicescape features, like the ability to add personal networks and share with Wi-Fi Buddies.

You’ll recognized the Devicescape “bug” and it’s called Easy WiFi - because - hey it is! If you haven’t read about this yet, check out the press release (also available in French and German) or read some of the great articles that have already been published.

Our friends at Nullriver added Devicescape Connect to the package list this afternoon, so everybody can now download it and try it out.

Please be aware that this is very much an alpha release. We’re looking for your feedback on this one. Tell us whether it works (and, just as important, if it doesn’t). Also, we don’t have personal networks or Wi-Fi buddies in there yet, though we’re looking at how that can be done.

If you haven’t installed it yet, the email responder for iphone@devicescape.com will be updated on Monday with download and installation instructions; if you can’t wait, install the Nullriver Installer.app and follow your instincts. If you get stuck, post something in our forum, add a comment here or send us an email - whatever works best for you.