I am now investigating another approach, using one of the TP-Link “travel routers” for £17. This goes ethernet to wifi, and if it supports adhoc wifi that will do it (the tablet can do ethernet).
Whether the device (or any other similar device) actually supports adhoc wifi seems impossible to discover without buying one and trying it… It certainly cannot bridge adhoc wifi to infrastructure wifi (it turns out that many people have been down that road, with android tablets not supporting adhoc wifi) but it might do adhoc wifi to ethernet.
I did look into flashing the tablet with Cyanogenmod but the support is barely a few weeks old, so lots of stuff won’t be working properly.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Routers with OpenWRT and similar firmware can easily do that (see e.g. here), but why do you specifically need ad hoc?
