This is huge for me - I'm in rental cars every other week or so 'cause I fly a lot for work and getting to factories in the boonies isn't really doable on public transport. I used to spend 20 minutes in the europcar car park every single time and then have to log out of everything when I dropped the car off. Now I just hook up Android Auto and I'm back into the same podcast I had on the flight, my itinerary is planned in already and I can head straight to my hotel. Still have the old problem with smart TV's though. Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop.
> Can't usually be fucked to login for two nights so I just watch TV on my laptop
I recently had the idea of taking the FireStick 4K Max that I bought ~1year ago for the living room smart OLED TV which is getting a little older, I had gotten ready to take it on a few trips I'm doing this year, thought I was being clever, unfortunately it died a literal week after the warranty, boot looping constantly.
I won't buy another Firestick again, it was atrociously add-riddled and often showing things inappropriate for the kids in the middle of the day, but if generic Android TV stick like that was available with good performance and all the necessary DRM levels, I'd probably use that.
For now, I will just carry an HDMI cable and use my laptop.
My wife swears by using a FireStick. It was miserable due to hotel captive wifi portals often failing to work properly with the browser of the FS, and even when it does work, typing your name/room number is miserable on a TV.. Adding a travel router to the mix allows you to auth via phone/laptop, which makes things a whole lot nicer.
Unlike the sibling, I've never encountered a hotel with all ports blocked. But I have encountered hotels where there is no way to choose other ports. In that case, I've just unplugged their STB and plugged my FS in.
I haven't tried this on iPhone yet, but on android you can share Wi-Fi connection. Many times I've connected phone to hotel Wi-Fi and then chromecast to my phone.
Sadly, we're both on iPhone and you cannot share Wi-Fi like that on iPhone :(
This was a bummer just the other day where my iPhone somehow (and I still don't know how) auto-signed into an amazingly fast wifi AP managed by my cell provider, but I was stuck working on crappy guest wifi on my laptop and could not get the laptop onto the better wifi.
