Starwood Hotels & Resorts has begun a pilot program in two of its major hotel locations in Manhattan and Silicon Valley, which does away with keycards altogether by allowing guests to enter their rooms using just their smartphones.
You're in a hotel room, and you want to hook up to the in-room Wi-Fi. And guess what? It sucks, just like at every other hotel you ever stayed at. So Instead you dig out your MacBook and hook it up to the hotel's Ethernet cable, and use internet sharing to generate your own wireless network.
Wait… The newest MacBooks Air don't have Ethernet ports. But don't worry: you can pick up the $60 mySpot from Kanex, a little dongle which takes an Ethernet connector and turns its sweet network payload into a wireless cloud, ready for all your iDevices and your non-Ethernet MacBook Air.
The Wall Street Journal seems to think so, reporting that Orbitz points users of its online web travel booking service to different, sometimes more expensive, options when those users use a Mac.
What the heck, Orbitz?
Add free hotel Wi-Fi to the list of services Apple’s iPad is making a thing of the past. The bad thing about the iPad being the best-selling gadget on the planet is, paradoxically, that the iPad is the best selling gadget on the planet. Turns out, the iPad sucks up quadruple the amount of wireless bandwidth as a smartphone — and hotels want to start metering your usage.
