Tuesday, May 3, 2011

iPhone Hotspot Tip

My PlayBook works with my iPhone WiFi hotspot. Connection is seamless and easy. Of course that often means my hotspot is also accessible to others who might want to connect to my phone without my knowledge.





Protect your hotspot with a strong password, using a mixture of upper/lower case characters, numbers and symbols. You type this password infrequently, so a long password is not a big inconvenience.

Here's my tip: Use a misleading network name in place of the default which is something like 'Craig's iPhone'.

I routinely use hotspot names like unavailable, offline, not available,  disconnected and disabled. It is amazing how well this kind of name works. Even when I tell someone exactly what to do, they get confused and have trouble connecting to unavailable or offline.


BTW - Taking snapshots of the PlayBook screen (like above) is easy:
Just press the < volume down and volume up > buttons simultaneously to have a snapshot placed in your PlayBook camera folder.
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8 comments:

  1. marioMay 3, 2011 at 6:32 PM

    Craig, how did you figure out the < volume down and volume up > shortcut? Is there a list somewhere?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Craig StatchukMay 4, 2011 at 7:14 PM

    Sorry Mario but I can't remember where. It was a geeky PlayBook Blog somewhere. After a while, they all look the same :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. HealthProMay 13, 2011 at 8:00 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. HealthProMay 13, 2011 at 8:03 PM

    Unfortunately, screen shots don't work when the BlackBerry Bridge is enabled.

    ReplyDelete
  5. PayamMay 28, 2011 at 9:17 AM

    I have an iphone4 and a playbook. I cannot get my playbook to connect to my iphone when I enable the Wifi HotSpot. I used my neices IPad, and her ipad connected with no problem which means my iphone setting is 'probably' correct. Is there something I need to do on my playbook to get this going? Thanks,

    ReplyDelete
  6. PayamMay 28, 2011 at 9:27 AM

    I think the problem I'm having is explained here:
    http://forums.crackberry.com/f222/if-your-pb-can-not-connect-iphone-hotspot-606554/#post6244186

    I'll give it a try and see how it goes.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Craig StatchukMay 30, 2011 at 6:05 AM

    Thanks for the tip.

    To avoid difficulties I try to use SSID names that are 1) all lowercase letter and 2) no spaces. By default, Apple assigns a name like "Craig's phone". That's just plain bad.

    The iPhone uses 'WPA2 Personal' encryption. The PlayBook has no problem with this protocol. When initially setting up a hotspot I'll start with just lowercase characters and numbers in the password. After that works, I change to a more secure password.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Music ManDecember 4, 2011 at 6:05 PM

    How do I change the name of my phone to unavailable?

    ReplyDelete

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