Thanks for the info Tokyo Dan. Looking forward to grabbing your podcast to hear your experiance. I guess I will avoid Fon for my trip to Japan. Will take a look at the Yahoo service instead.

Glad to hear that you like yours. I love mine. I have been finding new ways to use it and will definatly be retiring my UMPC now.

To turn off power saving:

• Disconnect from the WiFi
• Go into the Control Panel
• Choose Connectivity
• Choose Connections
• Select the connection name for your FON
• Choose Edit
• Hit Next twice to get to the last page
• Set Power saving to intermediate, and hit OK on the confirmation.
• Hit OK, Finish, Done, and OK to get out of the Connectivity applet.
• Reconnect, and see if it works.
  If it's still bad, repeat, but turn Power saving off entirely.

This is a connection-specific option, so it'll only kill your battery when connected to FON routers.

Hello Benson, The "intermediate" setting did the trick and I'm posting this with my N810 via my home FON wireless router. Thanks a million!

gshocker,don't give up on FON just yet. Benson's great advice fixed my problems.

Well it seems that everything is finally perfect. I'm now online from home via the FON router and I'm posting via the n810. Last night after verifying that's nothing's wrong with the n810 by going online at the access point at McDonald's, I came home and felt like celebrating with a bottle of shochu. While drinking the shochu I thought why not make another episode of my continuing saga of the n810. I just uploaded it for your listening pleasure. Have to warn you though...the effects of the shochu are evident, and my next door neighbour, Hiroshi, was blasting music which can be heard through my open window. Here's the file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/whitokyo/R09_0003.MP3

Benson, that's very clever, well done.

It's a shame FON won't allow power-saving, but at least this allows some kind of connection from the tablet.

F.Y.I.,

The FON people have been very helpful although they couldn't give me a simple and elegant solution like Benson did.

Anyway, in case anyone's interested, check out this thread over on the Fon Board:

http://boards.fon.com/viewtopic.php?...p=30177#p30177

Incidentally, there's a rival to FON called Wippies which is essentially the same kind of thing:

http://www.wippies.com/

It's currently only in Northern Europe and Spain, but it will presumably continue to expand over time.

What's interesting is it's being run by a Finnish phone network operator called Saunalahti. They are actually helping people to avoid paying for phone calls. :-)

Hey folks, the one downside to Benson's method (and I know, because I need to use it on my in-law's router) is that it eats your battery for breakfast. This isn't a problem if you are able to plug your tablet in a lot, but if you like to carry it around the house, you'll be shocked at how fast your battery disappears.

I am saddened by the number of crappy routers out there that can't handle the power saving features of the N8x0. I mean, come on, guys. You're designing a device that has constant access to all the power it can eat. It is serving wireless network access. Devices which would want wireless access are quite likely to not have access to wires, so they're going to need power conservation features. Is this rocket science?

I have the same pet peeve with motherboard / chipset manufacturers that don't support proper sleep states. The problem is so bad that Microsoft disables S3 sleep in Windows XP if you have USB devices attached, because manufacturers usually screw it up. My media computer can be put to sleep with the USB remote, but then you have to reach around behind the TV and hit the power button to wake it up. Argh.

The legacy of the cheap-energy-90s. Nobody thinks about power conservation.

The FON router is the first one I've come across that didn't work with the tablets power saving.

Even the cheapest router models can handle power saving, I've no idea why FON decided to use a model that can't.