mywi
Latest
MyWi gets friendlier with iOS 5, brings faster connection speeds and improved reliability
by04.06.2012
Why shell out cash for those extra tethering fees when you've got MyWi, right? Well, you'll be happy to know the $19.99 jailbreak app has gone through a major revamp. MyWi v5.5 brings along a "total rewrite" for folks on iOS 5, while also promising a speedier connection, faster hotspot load times as well as improved overall reliability. Additionally, the overhauled application adds a couple of new features, including an upgrade to MyWi On Demand, which now uses Bluetooth to trigger hotspot mode. MyWi version 5.5 is up for grabs now via the App Cydia store, though you may need to keep it a secret from your carrier.
Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me share my iPhone data to my iPad
by02.09.2012Dear Aunt TUAW, I find myself in an interesting position. I am going to be traveling for several weeks within the US. I have my iPhone on a grandfathered unlimited data plan and a wifi iPad 2. I would like to be able to use my iPad while away not only for FaceTime but also general use and even using my slingbox. I would rather keep my unlimited data plan, have thought about using an airport express but that might be cost prohibitive given hotel charges. Is there anything I have missed? If you post this to the blog I would prefer to remain anonymous. Thanks for the help and the great website! Your loving nephew, Anonymous Dear Anonymous, It's pretty easy to share a connection between a non-jailbroken iPhone and a Mac using any of the iProxy-style SOCKS proxy solutions. You can Google up web pages galore about these solutions -- and a new proxy client seems to appear weekly on App Store before it gets pulled a few hours later. At the same time, it's rather hard to share between an iPhone and an iPad without jaibreaking. That's because you need some sort of shared Wi-Fi network and the iPhone cannot create an ad hoc connection without being jailbroken. There are various solutions around but most of them rely on you having a laptop along as well as the two devices, to create that ad hoc network. That makes things even clumsier and harder to set up. In general, you'll do best either by jailbreaking and using MyWi or by buying or renting a third party Wi-Fi hotspot (like Clear or MiFi). Unfortunately, if you do enable iPhone tethering through AT&T, you will give up your unlimited plan. Some TUAW folk have done exactly that -- freeing themselves from feeling they must hold onto the unlimited plan for dear life. Hugs, Auntie T.
AT&T: no more unlimited data for illegal tetherers
by08.04.2011There's a war on unlimited data being fought as we speak, and Ma Bell is leading the main charge. Just days after AT&T announced it would begin throttling data speeds for the heaviest bandwidth hogs grandfathered into the carrier's no-limit internet service, it's also confirmed it's ready to crack the whip on illegal tethering as well. In attempt to achieve "fairness for all of [its] customers," the carrier has added a bit of force behind its March announcement, sending out notices to anyone using their jailbroken iPhones as a mobile hotspot. The gist? Cut it out or be scaled back to a tiered data plan. In a statement originally given to 9to5mac, an AT&T spokesperson said: Earlier this year, we began sending letters, emails, and text messages to a small number of smartphone customers who use their devices for tethering but aren't on our required tethering plan. Our goal here is fairness for all of our customers. (This impacts a only small percentage of our smartphone customer base.) The letters outline three choices: 1. Stop tethering and keep their current plan (including grandfathered unlimited plan) 2. Proactively call AT&T or visit our stores and move to the required tethering plan 3. Do nothing and we'll go ahead and add the tethering plan on their behalf - after the dated noted in their customer notification We reached out to AT&T and confirmed that this statement is indeed true. Consider this the company's last warning -- your time to enjoy all-you-can-eat tethering is almost at an end. How soon the day of reckoning will come, however, likely depends on when you received the notification originally. And you thought you were being so sneaky...
AT&T tells customers using unauthorized tethering methods to pay up or stop (update)
by03.18.2011Been using an app like MyWi to enable tethering on your jailbroken iPhone? Then there's a good chance you've already received a message like the one above from AT&T, or perhaps an email like the one after the break. By all accounts, the carrier is now cracking down on all unauthorized tethering, and it's asking folks engaged in such behavior to either pay up for a proper tethering plan or simply stop tethering altogether -- if it doesn't hear anything back for you after sending the message, AT&T says it will automatically enroll you in a DataPro 4GB tethering plan (at a rate of $45 a month). We should note that all the reports we've seen so far are from iPhone users, although that certainly doesn't mean Android users will simply be allowed to slip by unnoticed. Exactly how AT&T is identifying users isn't clear, however, and we could well just be seeing the beginning of a cat and mouse game as folks try to discover workarounds to go undetected. More on this one as we get it. Update: AT&T reached out to us and, yes, this is pretty much all there is to the tale: the "small number of smartphone customers who use their devices for tethering but aren't on our required tethering plan," are being contacted to either cease and desist or prepare to start paying for the service. No word yet on how many customers have been contacted, but it does seem that they're all using iPhones. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
AT&T aggressively moving against unauthorized tethering
by03.18.2011AT&T is ruining a lot of people's days with a customer mailshot explaining that its "records show that you use [tethering] but are not subscribed to our tethering plan." iOS, of course, will disable the built-in tethering facility if you do not have an appropriate carrier plan. There are a few jailbreak apps, the most popular of which is MyWi (previous TUAW coverage), that bypass the plan check and enable tethering independently. When you run MyWi or similar apps, your iPhone creates a wireless hotspot that allows you to connect other devices without the explicit permission of your carrier. Until now, people have assumed that AT&T either doesn't care or cannot determine that the traffic comes from a connected device rather than the iPhone itself. Clearly, those assumptions are incorrect. OSXDaily.com has the full text of the letter. It goes on to state that users can either terminate their unauthorized tethering usage before March 27, or they will be automatically moved to AT&T's DataPro plan. DataPro includes tethering and doubles the data cap from 2 GB to 4 GB, but also costs an extra $20 per month compared to the normal smartphone data plan. Any customers on the grandfathered unlimited data plans from older iPhone plans would also lose that facility if they moved to DataPro. (Update: reworded this paragraph for clarity based on feedback from @GlennF and @Chartier; thanks guys!)
AP photographer uses MyWi to cover Bahrain protests
by02.17.2011James Lawler Duggan, a photojournalist from Washington, D.C., used his jailbroken iPhone 3GS and MyWi 4.0 tethering software to transmit photos from Bahrain (warning: photos are graphic in nature). This week, police locked down the capital of this small Persian Gulf kingdom as demonstrators prepared to protest against the country's monarchy. After capturing several emotional photographs of the protests and violence, Duggan and his colleagues found the country's internet connectivity slowed to a halt. Duggan used his iPhone to overcome this obstacle and transmit his photos to the Associated Press wire in Cairo. "My jailbroken 3GS running MyWi 4.0 proved to be the only way for me to get the images to Cairo, and even still, the resolution had to be dropped significantly to squeeze them through the pipeline," Duggan told us via email. MyWi 4.0 from Intelliborn can transform any jailbroken iPhone or iPad into a mobile hotspot, allowing multiple laptops to connect to the internet through the device's 3G data service. It is available online for US$19.99. This week's events in Bahrain are the latest in a series of uprisings in the region. Duggan's ability to share images of the upheaval using his iPhone shows how technology has changed the way information is shared with the world.
MyWi OnDemand offers major connectivity upgrades for iPhone-as-hotspot (jailbreak)
by02.03.2011For the last few years, MyWi has basically owned the iPhone-as-hotspot jailbreak market. With the app and a jailbroken iPhone or iPad, you could share your 3G or EDGE connection with other devices with just a few simple taps. Multiple laptops or other mobile devices could connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot at once. Now, MyWi OnDemand has been introduced by developers Intelliborn. It provides the same kind of easy-to-use connectivity, but it does so with a completely redesigned interface, providing functionality that's basically on steroids.
Talking with MyWi's Mario Ciabarra about VZW's hotspot announcement
by01.11.2011Verizon was widely lauded this morning when it announced that its new CDMA iPhone would provide built-in hotspot support. Hotspots allow users to connect to a phone and share that phone's data service to connect to the Internet. This feature, which is also known as "tethering" provides a way to share a single data connection among several devices including phones, laptops, and so forth. AT&T, which introduced tethering after many delays, has been charging customers a premium on top of their normal data service to tether. Based on Verizon's other smart phone plans, the VZW tethering feature will sell for a $20 per month, as it is on Android phones, on top of its $30 per month unlimited data plan. There will be a 5GB monthly limit for mobile hot spot usage. AT&T's tethering is limited to recent data-rationed plans and is not an option for customers who still use AT&T's original iPhone unlimited plan. As well, the iPad 3G's data plans do not offer a tethering option. What's more, you cannot tether your iPad to your iPhone's data with AT&T as the iPad's bluetooth tethering profile is disabled. You can, however, tether to your iPhone using a third party product called MyWi.
Verizon iPhone: Hardware is still the iPhone 4
by01.11.2011Sure, it would have been more exciting if Verizon launched its version of the iPhone with an incremented version number and splashy new hardware capabilites -- LTE! Super-Retina display! Downward-facing camera! -- but as expected, the new beastie is essentially the same as the existing iPhone 4 model. The primary difference is that Verizon's iPhone 4 is a CDMA unit, not GSM. This of course means that users cannot migrate their handsets between AT&T and Verizon; they have different radios and will only work on their respective network flavor. (Worthy of note, though, the Verizon agreement is non-exclusive, so a Sprint-centric CDMA iPhone is not an impossibility.) The CDMA phone is also far more limited for international roaming, so if you plan to travel overseas with your phone please think ahead. As Steve notes, CDMA is still not capable of simultaneous voice and data, so phone calls will interrupt your data sessions; you might consider letting the calls go to your voicemail, and using a Google Voice mailbox so you can get those messages while you're surfing (although it's possible Visual Voicemail will work when a data-only session is active; we'll have to try it out and see). Along with the different radio config comes a slightly different antenna arrangement, with another infamous air gap associated with the 'grip of death.' It's not clear yet whether this will have any bearing on the phone's connectivity, but since the working assumption is that Verizon's network > AT&T's network, dropped calls and dead spots are theoretically going to be less of a problem on Big Red than on Big Blue. The new VZW phone also sports the ability to behave as a MiFi hotspot, giving WiFi connectivity at 3G speeds for up to five devices. Although this isn't available on AT&T's plans as an official capability, the $10 $19.99 Cydia app MyWi for jailbroken phones already enables it, so it's reasonable to think that there's not a hardware-specific change in play; Verizon already offers the capability on several Android phones. Be aware, though, it will chew through battery like a gopher in a cabbage patch. That's another reason to be happy the VZW iPhone isn't shifting form factor at all; existing cases, battery packs and audio accessories should all continue to work unmodified. If only that were true! Laptop Mag and Slashgear both confirm that the mute switch and volume buttons have moved, meaning many (but not all) existing cases won't fit (see here). D'oh. Developing story: stay with TUAW today for all the Verizon iPhone news.
My3G bypasses 3G restrictions
by08.02.2010This morning, I learned several things about using FaceTime in public. First, I realized that holding an iPhone a foot or two away from your face and talking tends to make you speak very loudly. This, in turns, tends to annoy other patrons in the restaurant. And this, in turn, tends to attract the same kind of people who love to stop and watch accidents happening. Second, I learned that keeping your arm elevated as you FaceTime is really, really awkward (not to mention tiring). As you're probably aware, if you've used FaceTime for any length of time, if you don't hold your unit fairly high up, you tend to share unflattering nasal visuals.
Ask TUAW: Shopping for new Macs, iPhone home screens, home folder on external disk, and more
by02.26.2010Welcome back to Ask TUAW, our weekly troubleshooting Q&A column. This week we have questions about whether to buy a 27" iMac or a MacBook Pro, increasing the number of iPhone home screens, moving your home folder to an external disk, and more. As always, your suggestions and questions are welcome. Leave your questions for next week in the comments section at the end of this post. When asking a question, please include which machine you're using and what version of Mac OS X is installed on it (we'll assume you're running Snow Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify), or if it's an iPhone-related question, which iPhone version and OS version you have.
iPhone hacksugar: Creating a MyWi WiFi hotspot with your jailbroken phone
by02.10.2010Here's the thing. You know, and I know, that AT&T has not yet enabled tethering in the US for the iPhone, while carriers all across the globe have already given their iPhone customers the ability to use their phones as wireless modems for their laptops. You and I also know that strictly speaking tethering falls outside the normal terms of use for your iPhone data contract -- and that there are jailbreak solutions to get around this (hopefully temporary) constraint. That having been said, you know, and I know, that there are times when your cable modem goes down and you have a bandwidth emergency. You're not planning to abuse your data contract, but you do need a backup plan for those rare instances so you can get some work done. Enter MyWi, for jailbroken iPhones. Selling for ten bucks via the Rock Store and Cydia, MyWi enables tethering on your 3.1+ iPhone (2G, 3G, 3GS) and creates a personal Wi-Fi hotspot. It's as if AT&T had actually enabled the feature on-board. What's more, it works just like a real hotspot does. Unlike other solutions that require you to create ad-hoc Wi-Fi networks on a Mac and then connect to them from your iPhone, MyWi works like the Sprint/Verizon MiFi. You can connect to your iPhone data from an iPod, a laptop, or even an iPad. They'll see your iPhone as just another Wi-Fi hotspot. If security is an issue, MyWi offers optional WEP with a customizable key. TUAW is commonly provided with not-for-resale licenses or promo codes to permit product evaluations and reviews. For more details, see our policy page. Promo code requests are not guarantees of reviews.