Finally Tethered!

I've had my Palm 700WX on Sprint around 18+ months now . . . I originally had a Sprint PPC 6700 and after too numerous problems Sprint "upgraded" me to the Palm 700WX, and I've loved it ever since. One thing that bugged me was the tethering capability. The Treo modem is disconnected via one firmware update . . . and the only way to get it back is to add a data plan onto the phone. I'm already paying for the data plan though, and my normal traffic on the phone really negates any benefit for paying even more money to occaionally connect my laptop to get a connection.

I decided to download the Mobile Stream USB Modem (www.mobile-stream.com) software a while back and was successful in getting my Windows system to connect. I forgot about it for a while and then tried the Junenet PDANET software. That combo allowed my Mac to connect via Bluetooth, but I couldn't get my laptop to connect. Today I tried the whole process again using the USB Modem software and was able to connect the laptop via a USB cable . . . that was pretty exciting in itself, but I had already bought a Bluetooth dongle (Trendnet) to use on the Linux laptop. I dug around and decided to use the dialup script from this web site: http://www.tikirobot.net/wp/tag/treo/ Finally after some fiddling I was able to get it connect up.

Some key points from this excercise:

1) FIRST AND FOREMOST -- check your EVDO icon . . . if it indicates that it's got a data connection, the software won't connect . . . the modem is already busy. I finally figured that out and it made things go a lot better!
2) Instructions on the 700WX are just about non-existent. I searched EVERYWHERE looking for every little nugget of knowledge I could find . . . and that web site listed above had instructions for the 700P (Palm OS) versus the Windows Mobile.
3) The biggest key is finding the right "channel" for the modem. I originally bound the USB to Bluetooth rfcomm and used the wrong channel . . . that doesn't allow your dial connect strings to work at all . . and Linux isn't very encouraging in allowing you to figure out things.
4) Ironically the Fedora Core 9 software on the laptop connected on it's own when I plugged in the USB cable it made the connection, but again, you have to make sure the phone isn't already using the modem. Mine is checking mail via my Mail2Web Exchange Server, as well as my Remember The Milk sync . . . so it's pretty busy.

I'm going to document this further, but at least I've captured a few things that I figured out along the way. I had to massage the connection script a bit to allow for path differences on my laptop/OS, but everything seemed to work just fine. I don't have Flash on my laptop yet, so I can't go running a speed test or anything . . . but regardless of the actual speed, it's just nice to be able to connect up anywhere I want to, regardless of a wireless 802.11 connection.