Hands up who doesn’t care about mobile internet access charges. Everyone else, while their hands are in the air, go for their wallets. Unless you’re on an all-you-can-surf 3G tariff, every little click means a few less pence in your bank account – and those little clicks can quickly add up.

Which is just one reason why we love Wi-Fi, found on all Nseries Nokias, most Eseries phones, plus smarty-pants like the new 5800 XpressMusic. This clever little app sniffs out the strongest free hotspots for your phone and gets you online, quickly and securely.

Nokia’s onboard connection manager is pretty basic, lacking any indication about a hotspot’s signal strength or even whether it’s locked, until selected.

Install and run WeFi (it’s tiny and free to download), and it will then pop up as a choice in your list of access points. You can also set it to start automatically each time your phone is turned on.

When WeFi runs, it scans the locality for Wi-Fi routers, telling you which ones have been verified against its database (to avoid malicious hotspots), which ones are locked, which require a log-in and which are totally open. By default, it connects automatically to the strongest open hotspot, although you can set it to choose your home network, for instance.

And that’s about it. When running on a laptop (PC and, soon, Mac), WeFi adds social networking features to map Facebook friends logging on nearby, automatically Twitter your location or let you report new hotspots for its database. Sadly, none of those are to be found on this stripped-down mobile version, which costs this impeccable and invaluable little app its final star.

Key details

Size: 265KB

Price: Free

Download here: WeFi