There’s two reasons why I use Nokia N95 8GB instead of iphone at the moment. One is the relatively high quality video camera, which I need for the ArcticStartup interviews and the second is JoikuSpot, which have been my lifeline after my Finnish ISP, Elisa, decided to provide horrid service and cut my ADSL connection when I needed it the most. I now use Nebula, but before I transferred I found JoikuSpot to be gold dust and now I use it whenever I’m on-the-go.
JoikuSpot is a Finnish mobile software that you can connect to Internet easily with and securely using your mobile phone’s 3G internet connection. In effect, you will always have a secured personal WLAN (Wi-Fi) HotSpot on-the-go. Multiple devices can connect in parallel and seamlessly share the same 3G internet connection, even though that will naturally slow the connection down. The service is a fantastic back up and a great way to do work on-the-go. For ArcticStartup it has been priceless as we’ve been able to connect from the venue as the events unfold and live-blog the news to you.
Joikuspot has been downloaded (Light + Premium) a total of 350,000 times through different channels. The numbers started to run wild just recently after JoikuSpot got distributed globally via Nokia Download! client. In total JoikuSpot will be pre-installed in 23 different phone models and about 50 million Nokia phones. The software will be for example in Nokia’s new touch phone 5800 Music Express.
JoikuSpot light is free and the Premium costs 15 euro. The company sells the Premium model also as a white-label to operators. First one out is the Fon model. They have also couple other operators ready to go, but can’t give out names just yet.
The Premium version has the following additions:
- 3G auto reconnect: Restores the 3G/Edge/GPRS connection in bad network conditions.
- Support for new phones: Nokia N96, N78, N79 and N85
- Support for 13 languages including French, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Chinese, Japanese Spanish, German, Italian, Finnish, English and Swedish.
- Light supports only HTTP(s), email protocols (e.g. Gmail, Outlook) not supported in Light
- Premium supports email protocols
- Premium supports secure corporate intraweb access (VPN)
- Premium is optimized for fastest and most stable network connection quality
- Premium supports Skype and messengers
- No forced first landing page in Premium
You can find the supported mobile phones models at the JoikuSpot website.
Sometime early 2009 JoikuSpot is aiming to bring more sophisticated models to the market. They told ArcticStartup that the up-coming features will be something that has not be seen before in the mobile industry. We just hope this would include a faster connection, as even though the software is a life saver it’s painfully slow at that. WiMax anyone?
ArcticStartup is happy to be able to give out 20 free JoikuSpot Premium invites to the first 20 readers who tells us why they need one in the comments.
