Bought my signifigant other a Galaxy Tablet for an upcoming trip and decided to get her up and running with WiFi tethering. I tether my laptops to my Droid’s frequently and love it. Long story short, it wasn’t as straight forward as I had hoped. After several hours of frustrating work trying to get a wifi only Samsung Galaxy tablet connected to an ad-hoc network, I finally have found a solution. The problem is that I needed to be able to connect the tablet to one of our rooted Droid 1 phones which are running wifi tether. This is quite difficult (thanks Google) to do because Android filters out and hides ad-hoc networks. After trying many things including switching out the wpa_supplicant for a different one via Root Explorer, I have found the following to work well. Keep in mind that simply allowing the OS to connect to ad-hoc networks would be ideal.
Be sure to have a working setup of wifi tether running on your phone if that is where you are sourcing the ad-hoc connection.
Step 1: Root your tablet using Z4root and reboot as required.
Step 2: Install ZT-180 on the tablet from the Android Market.
Step 3: Configure the ZT-180 application to connect to the SSID of your wifi tether application.
Step 4: Switch to ad-hoc mode within ZT-180 and enjoy 🙂
It appears to me that the ZT app acts as a proxy between the tablet and the ad-hoc peer.
Truly shame on Google here, there are so many user forums filled to the brim with requests and issues. I can only begin to think of the number of people who have to void warranties and/or for go support by rooting their devices to do something the iPad allows by default.
–himuraken
I seriously hope Google makes a change here. As noted the iPad works quite well in this situation and that is a tragedy. Although certainly not a reason to go with Apple. (The iPad 1 I have was a hand-me-down gift) I thoroughly enjoy my Droid Pro and it works great as a WiFi hotspot. Note: in “hotspot” mode the rest of the functions become pretty much useless the longer I am connected.