Last week, we introduced My WiFi technology as an option on the Dell Studio 15, Studio 17 and the Studio XPS 16 laptops to customers around the world. If you haven’t heard of it, My WiFi makes your Dell laptop into a personal area network. It’s an Intel technology that enables a laptop equipped with it to serve as a wireless access point to other Wi-Fi devices. Take a look at this demo from them for a bit more background about what it is and how it works.
My WiFi is part hardware (an internal Intel 5300 Wi-Fi adapter) and Intel’s management software. It allows you to connect up to eight Wi-Fi devices and to share files between them on a Centrino 2-based laptop running Windows Vista or and pretty soon on Windows 7.
So what could do with My WiFi? If you’re at a hotel and logged in for broadband access, you could share your connection with other Wi-Fi enabled laptops in a room, or transfer images from a Wi-Fi enabled smartphone to your laptop. In the home networking side, you could use it to print wirelessly or to share photos from your laptop directly to a photo frame without having to transfer the images through a cable or via an SD card. Pretty cool stuff.
My WiFi is not just about sharing an Internet connection. It’s also about cable replacement. Many other options allow you to do either of those things, but not both. Intel achieved the ability to do both concurrently by virtualizing the Wi-Fi radio so that the wireless LAN and the WiFi personal area network use two different modes. Take a look at Intel’s Tech Brief for more about how it works.
Intel’s been talking about My WiFi technology back in January and even before, so if you interested in learning more about it, take a look at their My WiFi site. The document repository includes a fact sheet, an FAQ , an updated device interoperability report and more. And speaking of device compatibility the Dell V305w and V505w printers work really well with My WiFi.