Alright, now that you have seen the results attainable by sharing your phone’s HSDPA connection to your PC or other devices, we will show you how to go about getting it all up and running. Have a practice now before you head off on that weekend adventure, as you would hate to have any headaches during your getaway.
First of all, you will need a phone which has either Windows Mobile 6 or Windows Mobile 5 with AKU 3 installed. These versions of WM include a basic program simply called “Internet Sharing” (Start -> Programs -> Internet Sharing). This is what allows you to easily setup internet connection sharing from your phone to your device. We used Windows Vista 32-bit for our testing but the process is also fairly similar in Windows XP, and as far as we know you will want Service Pack 2 installed on XP for it to work properly.
Your phone should come with a cradle or USB cable which allows you to connect it to your PC or other portable devices. Go ahead and make the USB connection between your Windows Mobile phone and computer. For the first time, Windows will detect the device using Plug and Play and install some drivers and configure some settings which you don’t need to worry too much about – let that finish and do its thing. Once the phone is fully installed, depending on your device you should be able to browse its content under My Computer (at least under Vista).
Once the connection has been established, go to your device and venture to the Internet Sharing application under the programs section. You will see something like the above image once you have loaded it. The next step is to simply click “Connect” at the bottom left – this will engage the connection and will automatically create the new local area network connection on your Windows computer. For one second or so it will say “Check USB connection” and then if all goes well, the status will show “Connected”. During this phase, if you are not already connected to your mobile data network, it will connect at this point automatically.
If all has gone well, you will now be connected to the Internet over your SIM HSDPA connection through a new local area connection, ours was called “Local Area Connection 4” but it will vary. Simply navigate to a website and you should be in business. If nothing is loading, something went wrong.
We noticed a strange issue where the phone would not always communicate with the PC (and issue IP addresses and so forth) but that was remedied by taking the battery out of the phone and restarting the process. We are unsure why it does this and the fix is even stranger. Most of the time we didn’t have any issues but you could always try restarting your computer and turning the phone on and off several times, which seemed to help during our testing.
The process for Bluetooth installation is basically the same except you’ll need to select “Bluetooth PAN” as the PC connection and will also need to ensure both devices are paired up with each other. This installation of Bluetooth varies depending on what software you are using; we are not covering it here.
