Tethering Is Exhilarating (With the Nexus One)

timothy found this link (hat-tip to Tim O'Reilly) to a paean to the joys of tethering. "In a short post, Steve Souders explores the current state of tethering 3G connections via iPhone (on which he basically gives up, for the perfectly decent reason of not wanting to jailbreak his iPhone) and the Nexus One, with which he has great success. His writeup serves as a micro-tutorial ('use PdaNet's Android app') as well as an endorsement."

Re:Not Surprising

[kimvette]

Many (non-US) iPhone carriers allow tethering but Apple strongly discourages it through technical measures. Their answer to customers is to contact the carrier for the provisioning files to enable tethering, and the carriers' response has been that Apple hasn't allowed them to deploy it, that they have to contact Apple. It's a game of passing the buck and customers are the ones getting pooched in the process.

It is trivial to enable tethering on a jailbroken phone but you can lose your "profiles" and "cellular data" settings tabs in the process, which can lead to visual voicemail being broken. I no longer have visual voicemail and since I am one of those users missing the profiles tab I need to learn how the profiles are configured and fix it at the shell prompt (courtesy mobile terminal or ssh).

Jailbreaking is now a 5 minute process

[linumax]

and it's virtually impossible to break/brick your iPhone in a way that it won't be restorable. In the rare event you manage to brick it, the only danger is losing the (in most cases useless) warranty. But that doesn't really matter because Apple support will check the humidity sensors and if they are not triggered, Apple will give you a replacement. They will not bother discovering whether the device was jailbroken or not. It costs Apple more to determine an unknown problem than to give you a refurbished or even new iPhone.

Special app?

[Wolfkin]

Tethering is built into the n900. I had no trouble providing internet for my home network via 3G during snowmaggedon last month, when my internet went down. I use Ubuntu, but I'm sure it would have been about as easy with Windows or Mac.

Re:Not Surprising

[natehoy]

I've been with AT&T for a while, and you go into any AT&T store and look around at anything resembling a smartphone, and every last one of them supports tethering. It's a simple monthly add-on. There are even things that in no way resemble smartphones that do tethering just fine.

All smartphones except, of course, for the iPhone.

Can someone please explain the logic behind this? Why would AT&T offer tethering on Samsung, Nokia, RIM/Blackberry (just to name the ones I have used personally over the years), and not the iPhone? What logical reason is there for this? They'll gladly take your money on every other platform and offer you tethering.

Re:Welcome to 2006 Android Users

[MartijnL]

+1 Wow, tethering. Been doing that with my Windows Mobile 6 phone for two years now. That may be considered dancing with the devil but actually it is one of the things that on WM6 actually works, works very well and right out of the box. Speeds on Vodafone have been great too.