Turn Your Smartphone Into a Wi-Fi Access Point with WMWifiRouter

Exciting news for owners of Windows Mobile smartphones: WMWifiRouter lets you turn your handset into a Wi-Fi access point, able to share its high-speed Internet connection with one or more nearby notebooks.

Traditionally, leveraging your phone's modem capabilities involved a process known as tethering, which links phone and notebook via cable or Bluetooth. It's a bit of a hassle to set up, and it often requires buying a connectivity kit. Plus, Bluetooth tethering throttles the connection, so you don't always get full 3G performance. WMWifiRouter, a free utility, accomplishes the same thing as tethering, but with the speed and simplicity of Wi-Fi.

Once installed, the program effectively turns your smartphone into a wireless access point -- much like the pricey CradlePoint CTR-350 Cellular Travel Router and WAAV Airbox CM3 we wrote about a while back. Fire up your notebook, wait for it to detect the new "network," and you're off to the races.

A few caveats: WMWifiRouter is still in development, and there's not so much as a user guide available for it yet. If you're a novice user, you may want to steer clear for now. As for the hardware, you'll need a Windows Mobile 5/6 smartphone that has Wi-Fi (most models do) -- and even then you may encounter problems. Check other users' experiences in this online forum.

I'm between WM smartphones at the moment, so I can't put this to the test myself. If you're able to, please share your experiences in the Comments! [via Lifehacker]