WiFi on the Samsung SGH-i600 Smartphone - First Impressions

Having recently looked into WiFi on smartphones, and having noticed that entry level business contracts now include phones such as the Samsung SGH-i600, we just had to get our hands on one of these and try it out using a RedButton hotspot. Overall its been a fantastic experience. Naturally its not as easy to surf the web on such a small screen as it is on larger device, but it still is quite a thrill and in our line of business very usefull. The picture below, hastily taken while writing this post, shows the i600 sporting a RedButton hotspot portal page.



The i600 ships with Internet Explorer Mobile Edition, which has its merits but at RedButton we have a bias towards Firefox, sadly there is no Firefox Mobile (an outdated project, called Minomo, does exist though) but Opera has released Opera Mobile. To our knowledge IE Mobile does not support javascript, so we loaded Opera Mobile 8.65 Beta for Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone, wow thats quite a mouthfull. The combination of Opera and IE has proved to be usefull, we would log in to the RedButton hotspot using Opera, then browse using both browsers. Overall Opera is more advanced but it does have the drawback of having a licensing fee, whereas IE ships with the device.

Although the phone is great to have, its noteworthy that it is worth more than an entry level laptop, thats quite a bit of value to be carrying in one's pocket, not to mention occasionally dropping! After two days of use we'd have to conclude that this device ranks high up in terms of its ease of use. When it comes to logging into hotspots with the device, a web based hotspot login may be cumbersome. There are certainly other options to a web based login, and as devices such as the i600 become more common expect to see RedButton come up with a solution.