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Tethering a phone (bluetooth or adhoc wifi) to a tablet which has ethernet?

The Samsung S tablet has the bluetooth crippled so it can’t be used for internet access (“tethering”).

It’s wifi is also only “infrastructure”, not “adhoc”.

My phone can do bluetooth or adhoc wifi……..

Is there some pocket-sized device which can bridge bluetooth or adhoc wifi to ethernet?

Obviously it’s possible technically.

Going between infrastructure wifi and ethernet is just a common as muck wifi router, and some are quite small, but I doubt any of them do adhoc wifi. The ethernet to bluetooth method would have to present a bluetooth profile which is that of a network client device.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Routers with OpenWRT and similar firmware can easily do that (see e.g. here), but why do you specifically need ad hoc?

LKBU (near Prague), Czech Republic

Because the Nokia 808 (Joikuspot) can’t do infrastructure wifi

Why do I stick with that phone? example1 example2 example3 example4

Priceless

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Yes the photos are good quality, but the cameras on the latest smart phones are also very good indeed. Plus they can be a wifi hotspot.

Darley Moor, Gamston (UK)

No phone gets anywhere near the 808 in quality – except the also discontinued 1020, a win8 phone which is actually quite good if you want a basic phone.

Of course it all depends on what “you” find acceptable. It seems that most people nowadays are really happy with their phone pics, so there is no drive towards improving the cameras in the way Nokia did, in their one-off experiment before they went bust M$ bought them. The 8MP camera in my new Samsung tablet is pretty crap…

The real issue in this case is that Nokias don’t do an infrastructure wifi access point. But I think that’s true for most phones, with Android being one big exception.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

As I said, OpenWRT will do both infrastructure and ad hoc, and it can run on lots of routers or on an old PC. By the way, Windows can also bridge an ad hoc Wi-Fi connection to Ethernet.

LKBU (near Prague), Czech Republic

I have a Raspberry Pi with a generic Linux distro on it (Pidora in my case). Together with an AP-capable WLAN USB adapter, a USB power adapter and a few other bits and pieces, the total setup cost me less than 80 euros.

I use it as a go-to server/router/firewall when I’m on the road. I can easily connect to Wifi networks but can also set it up as an AP with just one command. Ethernet can be DHCP or fixed and I have all sorts of server programs (including DHCP) ready to go. I can also connect a USB hard disk to act as a media or installation server.

Being USB-powered, I can run it off mains, off another servers USB port or even off a battery pack. Very versatile, and I’m completely independent from anybody. Heck, I even have an unused 3G dongle lying around which I might add to the setup one day.

(I realize that this sort of stuff is not for everybody. But setting up Linux servers like this, and teaching others on how to do this, is actually my daytime job.)

Together with an AP-capable WLAN USB adapter, a USB power adapter and a few other bits and pieces, the total setup cost me less than 80 euros.

The TP-Link MR3040 costs less than 70 quid and contains a battery, is very small and does everything you want. If you need more, you install OpenWRT. Those devices are fantastic.

What is the smallest package this can be done in? It would need to be at most phone-sized and battery powered. The TP-Link looks an OK size…

Come to think of it, it’s probably less work to make the Android tablet support ad-hoc wifi as a client. The hardware definitely can but a corporate-arrogance decision has been made (and with win8.x too) to not support it. There is a number of apps in the shop which claim to make it work but none of them do, on the Samsung tablet, even though it is rooted. The only purported solution I found which sounded plausible involved recompiling some Java, which is beyond me.

For win8 there is a purported workaround involving a specifyng of the SSID manually and then win8 is supposed to see it, but I never made it work, on either the Lenovo tablet or the Nokia 1020.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

BTW, Thuraya sell the TP-Link MR3040 for 350 € for wifi support with the XT. It’s the original device with a different logo and preconfigured OpenWRT.

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