Ewan's been a fan of Wi-Fi on a mobile device for some time and he's been musing on just what makes Wi-Fi so darned useful. Especially so on the Nokia E61, E70, N91 and N93, which he uses in his three example uses.
Read on in the full article.
WiFi is just the number one requirement for me, even above a touchscreen (although I still consider that to be pretty important as well). In fact, lack of WiFi on the Symbian platform was the only reason I went over to "the dark side" a few years ago. If you live in a high GPRS cost area like I do (TMobile in the UK do 2GB for �10. Where I live �10 gets you 5MB!) then WiFi is a necessity if you are going to get the most out of your device.
Being able to download the latest news to your device to read on the bus into work each morning, without needing to either spend a fortune on GPRS or wait 10 mins to boot the PC is a god send.
3G is getting much cheaper though, where I live in Finland you can get unlimited internet access (and I do mean unlimited, no caps, the only restriction is no P2P) for about �5 to �10 a month extra. I used it to give my PC broadband access when my ADSL connection was broken.
3G will always have more availability, but wi-fi will always be cheaper if you're in range of a free hotspot, so hopefully future models will eventually merge the two systems into one internet access system that uses wi-fi when it can and 3G when it can't.
Yea, wifi is nice, but why on earth hasn't Nokia included the capability to browse Windows network shares (SMB/CIF/whatever its called these days)? At the very least they should have included a good FTP client. There is currently no real support for file-transfer outside of PC Suite...