I tried using my Droid X as a WiFi Hotspot this weekend at my son's house. Previously I had a feature phone and frequently used it to provide Internet access for my laptop with no difficulty. The WiFi hotspot was another matter entirely. At first it stayed connected for a long time - probably over an hour. Then it just shut off and I had to click on the application to get it to start the hotspot again. The time it would stay up got shorter and shorter until I got to the point where I could only load one page before it would drop. At times it reported that the service was unavailable. This was at the same time that a MiFi and Verizon USB modem both worked flawlessly.
Signal conditions probably couldn't be better. I could look out the window and see the Verizon antenna and the phone reported 3G/4 bars at all time. This is out in the country so the cell towers probably operate at a higher power than where they are spaced closer in the city.
I spoke with a Verizon tech and she suggested pulling the battery while the phone was on to force a full restart of the OS. That took me from a page at a time to about 20 minutes of uptime. (Interesting - the Droid X hotspot commercial just came on TV. ) This morning I just gave up as the link dropped repeatedly in the middle of downloading a batch of podcasts.
The performance of the WiFi Hotspot is a huge disappointment and bordering on unusable at times, even in locations with a superior signal.
I'm curious if anyone else has used the hotspot feature and if so, how did your experience compare.
thanks,
hank
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