There was a post a few months ago about how to use the iPhone to connect your laptop up to the internet. It was not an easy checkbox task and likely it would break once you upgraded the software on the phone.

Anyone looking in to that and has found an easier way way to do it? We have iPhone 3.1and 10.6.1 with new features. This would be a nice hidden feature.

tia

It's a feature supported in other countries... but AT&T has only "promised" that feature "later this year".

Unless it's a hack that you are referring to...

For a while, I was looking into tethering. It turned out that I didn't end up spending working days at the beach or in a park like I had idealized and my BlackBerry's Edge connection is too slow to do anything but e-mail.

Anyhow, I thought it would be cool to try to pick up one of those USB dongles second hand and use that. Are you thinking of using a mobile Internet connection regularly or seasonally?

I still think it would be cool to have a USB thinggy that I could activate only for the summer months.

I had one of those USB thingy from ClearWire - they worked great for internet and email , anything like YouTube it choked on and most times not play at all .

You do have to plan a monthly rate for it

Neither, more like once or twice a month I get an email while I am just iPhone and I really need to type a page or two.

I am spending my workdays at the beach and for the most part the iPhone does the job. In fact I like it more than having laptop connectivity since I am not tempted to jump over and solve the problem six ways. With the iPhone I just do it in a sentence and get back to the fishing.

The pdaNet requires jail breaking the phone. Since the Institute paid for it I don't think I can bust it and I don't want to put up with the hassle of not upgrading or jail breaking after each upgrade. The whole point is adding leisure time not adding screwing around with software.

Paying 360 a year extra is just too much for a rare email or google search. So the solution is likely to just use the iPhone the way it was supposed to be used, as a phone.

There's a dongle-type thingy that the guys at work plug into their laptops when they're traveling to connect to the Internet. They all fight over it, and get upset if someone signs it out before they do, so it must work pretty well. I'll have to ask the IT guy what it is.

Tethering quickly kills the phone battery anyway, unless you're in a car or building and can have it plugged into a charger.

Yeah, I kept reading that the battery was used up when tethering. Even if you are plugged into a charger the iPhone loses power. The phone isn't much use if it's dead.

I guess I just need to learn to type faster on the iPhone keyboard. I just learned that the spacebar hit twice puts down a period and a space. Doh. I also have the iPhone add "Sent by handheld" after my sig to explain the typos. I have the autocorrrect turned off since it usually screws up text and doesn't fix it. I need a typing tutorial for the iPhone

Seems odd to me the phone would lose power when plugged in. Those portable "mifi" devices you see now will connect 5 netbooks on battery for 4 hours.

Mr Kilowatt Man will stop by to explain soon.

Funny guy. :-P That's Reddy Kilowatt BTW.

But since you asked. I can only guess that maybe the Wifi chip's power is not being managed well by the pdaNet software, but more than likely the fact that since the phone is being used as a router the Wifi chip needs to be fully active all the time, rather than only fully activating when needed and then going to a low power mode like under normal use. Maybe that's why Apple doesn't support tethering, it would suck all the electrons out of the battery too quickly.

Wow, that's a flashback, Reboot! I used to have a glow-in-the-dark toy of Reddy Kilowatt when I was a kid.

Maybe that's why Apple doesn't support tethering, it would suck all the electrons out of the battery too quickly.

Huh.. Apple does support tethering...just not AT&T.
http://www.fiercemobileit.com/story/t-iphone-mms-coming-sept-25-tethering-still-delayed/2009-09-08
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2349349,00.asp


Plus I remember it being announced at the show.


Or am I misunderstanding you?

Explain what, why tethering on the iPhone sucks compared to other phones? I can tether my Omnia, and suspend it. Battery charges while tethered, not drains.

Didn't know Apple suported it, can't keep up. Obviously a bad guess by me then.

I wonder if it's the pdaNet software that's not managing the power well then or the Apple charging scheme sucks.

Thats got to be a slippery slope and a fine line to walk on .

I mean Apple has to honor its contract with AT&T that would not allow (Leeching) apps and devices on the iPhone over the AT&T network

Example;
Is this tethering since AT&T plans to offer this soon for a FEE - Apple in a sense cannot allow people to hack their phones to by pass AT&T fee base plan .

Oddly enough
Apple does have the "SKYPE" app in the store that does by pass the AT&T long distance charges - go figure ? I guess that Skype does not leech off AT&T systems

Isn't this official tethering going to cost an extra buck a day? 360 per year is two nice nights out. Forget it.

It's taxing the 3G network ATT is worried about until they get it upgraded. The Skype app only uses wifi. Over in Europe though Skype enabled phones can use 3G.

Dunno. I read that they would charge most likely... but I haven't heard how much.

Correct something like that

What I heard is;
Skype you can make calls while inflight on the airplane that offers wifi , where as a normal cell phone you cannot . It's that wifi -vs- satellite

My nokia phone would also still lose charge while tethered and plugged in. It's not just the wifi and/or 3G chips being kept hot, the actual constant data transfer up/down when browsing (in particular) takes a lot of juice as it involves constant flash memory activity too for data caching. Oh, and I had mine tethered by bluetooth too, so that was running as well! So you're basically using most of the phone at once in a fairly constant manner. And if the screen doesn't dim, there's that too. etc. etc. As the iphone's running a big OS compared to the nokia, I'm not surprised that there's faster battery drain as there's more constant housekeeping activity going on. It's the price we pay for a skinny phone that's almost a laptop.