Vapor wear such as microSD wifi cards
I bought a Samsung I640 mobile phone last week and I love it,
but,
it does have a flaw.
It is built from high quality materials and the full qwerty keyboard is more comfortable to use than the one on my old Sony Vaio laptop, it looks fantastic, it is a slider with an Ipod like wheel on the front and it surfs the internet faster than the USB modem on my computer, so what is the problem?
It is not WIFI enabled.
It doesn't have the wifi hardware and it is not able to employ any type of WIFI. The salesman in the shop told me it was able to, but it isn't. I called the telecom company who employs him to complain about him and his bad advice but they never rang me back, even though they promised that they would. They probably made him employee of the month for services to the cause of befuddling poor webmasters. I will try and refrain from going into exactly what circle of hell telecom salespeople who lie to innocent webmasters are destined for and just get on with the story.
This whole lack of WIFI thing shouldn't in theory be so bad because miniSD wifi cards are easy to get hold of and cheap, but the Samsung only has a microSD expansion slot which is too small for the current generation of mobile WIFI cards. There seemed to be no solution except to take the thing back and get a NOKIA but again I had a problem. Unfortunately I have fallen in love with the cute little Samsung.
I do need WIFI though because I'm not the richest of webmasters and I can not afford data roaming costs, I need WIFI and internet hotspots.
I searched and searched on the internet, looking for a solution...and I thought perhaps I'd found one.
The Spectec microSD WIFI card.
Page after page of sites told me that the card was a hard to believe technological miracle sent to cheer the heart of old, jaded and tired webmasters.
Oh joy isn't it wondeful to be living in such an age of techno-marvels.
I was happy for a moment until I noticed the dates on all these podcasts, blogs and articles which were singing the praises of the card, some with a photo of it.
Exactly the same story from 2006, 2007 and 2008.
It has been just a couple of weeks away from launch for 3 years. It is vaporwear. Worse than the hardwear that will fall apart in your hand, and worse than the softwear that does the things you don't want without being able to do the very things you need it to, vaporwear messes with the poor webmaster's mind without getting round to ever existing at all.
I'm too in love with my Samsung I640 to give it back. I'll just have to learn to love it despite its faults.