Amazon Kindle & Mixed Wi-Fi Security

Recently, my Father-in-law bought a Kindle for my Mother-in-law. He brought it home, read the instructions, and tried to get it it set-up to use his wireless network at home. He logged into his wireless router and got the security key, but when he entered it on the Kindle and tried to connect it would fail. He tried several times, even manually configuring the connection, but nothing seemed to work.

Wanting to determine if he had a defective unit (unlikely), he took it to a local McDonalds and tried connecting to the free Wi-Fi provided by AT&T… Success!

At this point, he called me to help him figure out what he was doing wrong since it seemed to work everywhere but home. I walked him through a few things over the phone before logging into his computer remotely and looking at the settings on the wireless router myself. The settings on his fairly new Belkin router were configured to use WPA/WPA2 for security. I had him try to manually set the Kindle to use first WPA2 and then WPA without success.

At this point, I changed the security settings on the router to be just WPA2 (not WPA/WPA2) and then had him try connecting the Kindle again… Bingo!

Apparently, the Kindle doesn’t like wireless routers that are set to use mixed mode Wi-Fi security settings. Since the only other device that he has to connect to his wireless network is his laptop, we can safely use the latest/strongest setting of WPA2 without worrying about older devices not being able to connect.

Hope this helps someone else out there!

MonoDroid Licensing

I have been playing around with MonoDroid for the past few weeks, mostly keeping an eye on how the betas have been progressing. I am very intrigued by the fact that I can use my normal development tools and language (Visual Studio 2010 & C#), even re-use existing libraries, to create a application that runs on Android.

However, while monitoring the mailing lists someone posed the question of licensing costs for MonoDroid once it reaches 1.0. Being that Mono is an open source project, I had assumed that there wouldn’t be a licensing cost… wrong. According the to the MonoDroid FAQ, while licensing hasn’t been finalized yet it will most likely follow a similar structure to MonoTouch (iOS version of Mono) and cost about $400 USD for an individual user and $1,000 USD for enterprise users.

Sorry, but as an individual user $400 USD seems a little steep for any small applications to be built using it. Even if I get 400 people to use my app and I only charge $0.99, I still won’t break even unless the application is a huge success. Then again, since C# and Java are so similar and Eclipse and the Android SDK are free, I could write core logic for the application in C# as a Web Service and then just building the UI in Java with Eclipse. No $400 USD entrance fee needed.

Would have been nice though… a WPF, Silverlight/Windows Phone 7, MVC, and Android app… all from the (mostly) same code base. Alas.