Hasta La Gadget!

A girlfriend with dubious motives. A frightened social networker. A lonely neighbor with an eye on his WiFi. Some of you are real wrecks! Luckily, so are we. Let’s commiserate. More »

The iPhone 4 will be on sale in China this coming Saturday, September 25th. Unlike the Chinese 3GS, the new iPhone will have Wi-Fi.

China had to wait two years after the iPhone’s initial launch before it was officially available there, although that didn’t stop a healthy black market form springing up. And after such a wait, the Chinese could only buy a hobbled version with the Wi-Fi removed due to government demands. Whether this was stop citizens having anonymous, mobile internet access or just to remove competition for China’ own wireless protocol, Wireless Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure (WAPI), we’re not sure. It was probably both.

The Chinese iPhone carrier Unicom (which, when set in Monaco, I always read as Unicorn) was still working to sell a Wi-Fi-enabled 3GS in March this year. Now, that has really been rendered moot by the new handset, which appears to be exactly the same as the one you or I can buy.

To buy the new iPhone, you can buy contract-free from Apple, or on-contract with subsidies from Unicom in exchange for a two-year commitment. From Apple you’ll pay CNY 5,000 ($744) for the 16GB model and CNY 6,000 ($894) for 32GB. On-contract prices depend on the usual nonsense, and can be found over at the Unicom site.

iPhone 4 Available in China on September 25 [Apple]

Chinese iPhone 4 [Unicom]

See Also:

• iPhone Goes to China Without Wi-Fi
• China Finally Getting the iPhone in September

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By John Herman

You live your life at 2.4 GHz. Your router, your cordless phone, your Bluetooth earpiece, your baby monitor and your garage opener all love and live on this radio frequency, and no others. Why? The answer is in your kitchen.

What We’re Talking About

Before we charge too far ahead here, let’s run over the basics. Your house or apartment, or the coffee shop you’re sitting in now, is saturated with radio waves. Inconceivable numbers of them, in fact, vibrating forth from radio stations, TV stations, cellular towers, and the universe itself, into the space you inhabit. You’re being bombarded, constantly, with electromagnetic waves of all kind of frequencies, many of which have been encoded with specific information, whether it be a voice, a tone, or digital data. Hell, maybe even these very words.

On top of that, you’re surrounded by waves of your own creation. Inside your home are a dozen tiny little radio stations: your router, your cordless phone, your garage door opener. Anything you own that’s wireless, more or less. Friggin’ radio waves: they’re everywhere.

Really, it’s odd that your cordless phone even has that 2.4-GHz sticker. To your average, not-so-technically-inclined shopper, it’s a number that means A) nothing, or B) something, but the wrong thing. (“2.4 GHz? That’s faster than my computer!”)

What that number actually signifies is broadcast frequency, or the frequency of the waves that the phone’s base station sends to its handset. That’s it. In fact, the hertz itself just just a unit for frequency in any context: it’s the number of times that something happens over the course of a second. In wireless communications, it refers to wave oscillation. In computers, it refers to processor clock rates. For TVs, the rate at which the screen refreshes; for me, clapping in front of my computer right now, it’s the rate at which I’m doing so. One hertz, slow clap.

The question, then, is why so many of your gadgets operate at 2.4 GHz, instead of the ~2,399,999,999 whole number frequencies below it, or any number above it. It seems almost controlled, or guided. It seems, maybe, a bit arbitrary. It seems, well, regulated.

A glance at FCC regulations confirms any suspicions. A band of frequencies clustered around 2.4 GHz has been designated, along with a handful of others, as the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical radio bands. “A lot of the unlicensed stuff — for example, Wi-Fi — is on the 2.4-GHz or the 900-Mhz frequencies, the ISM bands. You don’t need a license to operate on them.” That’s Ira Kelpz, Deputy Chief, Office of Engineering and Technology at the Federal Communications Commission, explaining precisely why these ISM bands are attractive to gadget makers: They’re free to use. If routers and cordless phones and whatever else are relegated to a small band 2.4 GHz, then their radio waves won’t interfere with, say, cellphones operating at 1.9 GHz, or AM radio, which broadcasts between 535 kHz and 1.7 MHz. The ISM is, in effect, a ghetto for unlicensed wireless transmission, recommended first by a quiet little agency in a Swiss office of the UN, called the ITU, then formalized, modified and codified for practical use by the governments of the world, including, of course, our own FCC.

The current ISM standards were established in 1985, and just in time. Our phones were one the cusp of losing their cords, and in the near future, broadband internet connections would come into existence and become magically wireless. All these gadgets needed frequencies that didn’t require licenses, but which were nestled between the ones that did. Frequencies that weren’t so high that they sacrificed broadcast penetration (through walls, for example), but weren’t so low that they required foot-long antennae. In short, they needed the ISM bands. So they took them.

Continue Reading…

Tired of waiting for that video to download? Want a blazing Internet connection regardless of where you are? Apple owners, the choice is Clear.  iSpot is a hotspot that lets you connect up to eight Apple mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch) and boosts the signal strength to 4G speeds over Clear’s WiMAX network, with a range of up 150 feet. 4G means 5 seconds to download a song and 4 minutes to download a 200 MB video.

Weighing in at 4.5 ounces, the iSpot fits in your (roomy) pocket to for on-the-go surfing, even in your car. You can password-protect your iSpot so you can control who has access to the hotspot. It supports 64-bit and 128-bit WEP, WPA, and WPA2 security standards.

Unfortunately, Clear is not available anywhere. Well, not quite: Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas, are some of the lucky few areas. Texas is best served, with coverage in all of the major (and many no-so major) cities (Abilene, really?). Midwest coverage is practically nonexistent unless you are in Chicago, St. Louis, or Kansas City. The entire Northeast region is a dead zone. And I’m still scratching my head over the logic of having coverage in Lancaster, PA (A.K.A. Amish county).

Regularly priced at $99 for the iSpot and a $29 month-to-month plan, Clear is having a special sale today with a $25 plan and getting the iSpot for free, with shipping fees waived. It hits the sweet spot for those who travel a lot to Clear cities and can’t bear to miss anything online.

If you’re looking for Wi-Fi signal, you can always pull out your laptop and fire up an app that will help you locate the closest hotspot based on the signal strength you’re getting, but if you don’t want to go through the effort, you could always use this stick. The Wi-Fi Dowsing Rod looks like the traditional Y-shaped stick that people in ancient times believed could lead them to water, except this one has been modified to include a Wi-Fi detector that helps you find the nearest hotspot.

The Wi-Fi Dowsing Rod has three lights on it that indicate wireless signal: two amber lights and a green light. If none of the lights are on, there’s no wireless signal in the area. When one light turns on, the rod has detected a wireless network, and you’re going in the right direction. If the second light comes on, the signal is getting stronger, and if the third light — a green one – appears, the signal is strong enough for use. If you go from two lights to one light, you’re going the wrong way. The rod is a concept project by Mike Thompson, so don’t expect to see it on store shelves anytime soon.

[via Gajitz]