There are several good reasons why Wi-Fi 802.11n hasn’t made its way
into mobile phones hardware just yet. Increased power consumption is
just not worth it if the speed will be limited by other factors such as
under-powered CPU or slow-memory anyway.
But when you have a 1GHz Snapdraggon CPU and 448 MB of RAM at your
disposal the temptation to include it might just be too big to resist.
And HTC obviously succumbed to it when designing the HD2
monster-of-a-handset. Unfortunately they disabled the feature via a
software method.
They didn’t do a very good job of hiding it though and it was really a matter of time before someone enabled it. The
usual suspects over at xda-delevopers have done the hard work, finding
the hidden entry in the registry named 11nModeDisable (duh!). Switching
its value from the default 1 to 0 converts your HTC HD2 in a lean mean
Wi-Fi n machine. It’s already been tested and works fine.
In case you are not quite familiar, let’s just point the advantages
of the 802.11n once again. It doubles the max range both indoors and
outdoors, compared to the common 802.11g standard. The theoretical
maximum net bitrate is increased more than eleven times to 600 MB/s and
the typical throughput is expected to be in the region of 50 to 144
Mbit/s.
Surely all that awesomeness is worth the somewhat shorter battery life, right?
Wednesday, 10 September 2014
