Newsletter: January/February 2009

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YEAR OF THE OX MEETS THE MONTH OF THE AX

FON chops down the price on the La Fonera 1.0!

To celebrate the Chinese New Year, we are offering our FON router, the La Fonera, at a discount for a very limited time. The La Fonera 1.0 will be available for just €15/$15*. Kung Hei Fat Choi!

Offer valid until March 31, 2009. Limit one per user registered with FON. Promotion code required.

Use the FON promo code: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Click here to enter the FON store.

*Price includes VAT/Tax. Shipping not included.

FON SAVES THE DAY

Big city blogger offers thanks to unknown Fonero in small town

Richard Allan, Head of Government Affairs for UK and Ireland, and political blogger, offered thanks on his blog to a Fonero in the small town of Bejar, Spain whose FON WiFi signal allowed Richard to finish some urgent business and get back to enjoying his holiday. According to Richard, “the blog underestimates my desperation at needing to access my work email for an urgent task. This was casting a cloud over my whole holiday. I spent hours trying to find some connectivity and FON really did save the day. Once I saw the FON access point in Bejar I thought I should be OK, but the service was even better than expected - cheap and very easy to use.”

GET READY FOR FON´s BEST ROUTER YET,
THE LA FONERA 2.0

Designed to fit your Web 2.0 lifestyle

Here is what to expect from the next generation of FON routers. Thanks to a USB port, and a growing selection of free open-source applications, the La Fonera 2.0 will let you control data streaming without even having to turn on your computer. While the La Fonera 2.0 manages uploads and downloads at home, you and your laptop will be free to do anything and go anywhere else. The La Fonera 2.0 will also allow you to share printers, scanners, webcams and other USB devices. And, as with all FON routers, the La Fonera 2.0 will allow you to make money and roam the world for free at FON Spots.

We’ve kept the La Fonera 2.0 as beta while our techies perfect its features. But, full functionality for everyone is coming soon. So, get ready!

Learn more about the Fonera 2.0.

Can´t wait? For a chance to win the La Fonera 2.0 (beta version) today, click here.

3 years of Fon

Well its been three years for Fon and today we will take a look at the current development of the La Fonera 2.0

From the fonosfera blog:

"OktoPussy represents the extendability of our firmware. It’s many arms resemble the plugins you will be able to install in it. It can use many arms at the same time, doing different tasks! It’s multimedia (remember when this word was being use for the very first times for PCs? Now it’s come to the routers!)

The new features and fixes are the following:

• Improved look and feel: added a few new buttons and icons
• New status page. We still want to integrate more information and format it in a nicer way… but now you can see some traffic stats on the different interfaces. Tell us if you love the graphics like we do!
• Added and fixed access to some services from the WAN interface: ftp now works and the webcam can also be accessed from the outside. Samba is the pending issue though, sorry windows lovers…
• New languages! Hungarian is there (thanks bmpeter) and well… any others would also be there but we need you guys to translate! Here you can find what to translate…
• We fixed the whitelisting system. Sorry, some of you reported you couldn’t sell passes from your devices. Too bad… but over!
• There’s a button to reboot the device and one to reset it to factory defaults
• Added the option to enable/disable replying to pings on the WAN side.
• Some internal working as I said… if you’re interested on what, check the svn logs.

And well, the first to arms of OktoPussy (official ones) are DDNS (DynDNS support) and, surprise, a FONBackup tool!"

"OktoPussy is making making good use of it’s name. Here it comes as OktoPussy-2 ‘reloaded’

In no time it has changed to adapt to the environment. This is the new stuff it brings for you:

• Samba works on WAN! Oh yes… You can finally connect the hard drive of your Fonera 2.0 from your home network! Some people were dying to have this
• More and more languages! Can you speak Traditional Chinese, Dutch? Then the OktoPussy-2 is for you!
• Hey! How about this? we like Windows too! (well, we don’t, but need to pretend). NTFS issues have been fixed so far. If you still experience trouble, go buy a new hard drive!
• We have added a nice timer for when you reflash the fonera and get rid of OktoPussy-2 to get the next animal. OktoPussy-2 will say goodbye like a real gentleman. No need to wonder if the flashing is over or not, it will let you know!"

"The Fonera 2.0 keeps growing and showing new abilities: now it’s a jukebox!

What do you need?

• Fonera 2.0
• USB 2.0 HUB
• Cheap USB audio card - or any similar model (the cheaper the better: they don’t lack quality)
• USB hard drive or Pendrive
• Speakers
• mp3 music

What do you get? A device able to play your music. either single songs, full directories or m3u playlists (yes, we used a standard) from your hard drive. You can let it playing and turn off your laptop."

and a video from Martins Blog: