'iPhone as modem' tethering hack revealed!

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 24 July 2008 07:39

Business IT - Technology

Want to use an iPhone to deliver data to your notebook or other device? Apple and the phone companies didn't want us to have this capability, but smart users have found a way.

We're not going spell out in detail how it's done - for that, you should go to cre.ations.net for some illustrated and reasonably detailed step-by-step instructions. NB: the method requires a jailbreaked iPhone, but that's not likely to be a surprise to anyone.

The method itself is ingenious. The key idea is to link the iPhone and the notebook in an ad hoc Wi-Fi network, run a proxy server on the iPhone, and then tell the notebook's browser to use that proxy.

Apart from the initial jailbreak, the steps seem straightforward for any moderately technical user. But it's not a matter of two clicks and "boom!", so it would be a good idea to set up the iPhone ahead of time and to store a copy of the article on your notebook's hard drive for later reference.

Remember, the whole point is to get your notebook online in a pinch, so unless you're happy to access the article via the iPhone's Safari browser - not that there's anything wrong with that, except it might not be the most convenient way of reading the instructions - you won't be able to access it directly from the web.

What would - or should - the phone companies think of this idea? Please read on .