It was a smallish crowd (four) who met for the July meeting on what may have been the hottest day of this summer. The initial discussion list was waived in favour of talking about tablets and smart phones. The tablet we were discussing was an acer refurb tablet running Android and attempting to:
- Connect to a public WiFi access point
- Tether it to a recently purchased Android phone. Via WiFi hotspot and USB.
Connecting to the wireless network seemed to work, but free wireless was not found. Rather than continue on, the real objective was to use the 3G service on the phone for places where WiFi is unavailable. Initial attempts appeared to succeed, but actual connectivity was not present. I offered my phone (iPhone) as a hotspot and everything worked flawlessly. I used both the local WiFi and 3G as services and it worked on both. Bruce had his Android phone and we tried with that and it worked properly as a hotspot and USB tethered. It seems the phone has a firmware bug.
After playing with the tablet and phones for a bit, we got to discussing “Apps” for the tablet and smartphones. Surprisingly enough, the same apps appear to be available for both Android and iOS. A couple that we talked about were Traffic Ottawa which allows you to view the intersection cameras all over the city and Future Gas Prices which tells you what the price should be tomorrow. I downloaded it and it said that gas would be 128.1/l and it was this morning, so it appears to work. I did notice that the afternoon price was 127.5 and now it’s still showing 128.1, so that may be an average price. Either way, if it can stop me from filling up at a higher price by either showing the price to be higher if I wait or do it now, it’s well worth it.
The discussion turned to using smart phones and tablets as part of the daily toolkit and I have to admit that my tablet and phone get used a lot, almost as much as the laptop. I’m a believer in reducing the number of devices I carry at any opportunity.
There was also a question on syncing outlook to google calendar if you use outlook but don’t use exchange. A quick search turned up a Google App for that which appears to do the job. I tried it and it works properly with my work computer: