Some more great news on the iPhone front!
For iPhone3G owners like me who rely quite heavily on the internet for many aspects and who specifically require WiFi or 3G cellular carriers at home and away, here is your answer. iPhoneModem 2. It certainly spells a dream come true for me and my needs. It quite simply turns your iPhone3G into a 3G modem tethered (connected wirelessly) to your laptop (requires WiFi on the PC or laptop you are connecting).
My situation:
I have my iPhone that I use wirelessly very regularly for email, internet, weather checks, MSN Messenger among quite a few other smart iPhone apps. I don’t have access to a lot of standard WiFi hotspots being in Port Elizabeth, South Africa so I make use of 3G cellular technology “expensively” (extensively).
Not everything I do though can be done on the iPhone so I also use my laptop extensively at home. Since I don’t have a home phone landline with an ADSL connection, in order for me to connect to the internet I had to buy a local carrier (Vodacom) external USB 3G modem card.
Thirdly, due to some issues I had with the iPhone talking to Vodacom, I had to use a second phone simply for voice calls. But that is a completely different topic. I am yet to test this now. Soon though.
All of the above require separate SIM cards, airtime and on the two 3G devices, data bundles. This is where it all got very expensive. The data bundle price breakdown is quite straight forward. The more you use, the cheaper it is per MB. 500MB is R189 and 1000MB (1GB) is R289 and so on and so forth. These all expire within 30 days. Apart from the pain of having to transfer airtime from device to device, it was also getting extremely expensive.
My ideal solution:
An iPhone that I could load with airtime, purchase a single larger data bundle for essentially less than two smaller bundles and be able to use them simultaneously. Have the laptop somehow connected to the iPhone so that it could piggy back off it’s 3G connection. This I know is very old news for Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson etc etc but strangely enough this is a new concept for Apple and the iPhone developers. I don’t understand the gain that Apple could have from withholding such technology. The pain is that they certainly look ridiculous and are seen in the consumer’s eyes as control freaks. This also is nothing new!
Cue the third party application, Addition’s iPhoneModem 2. This unfortunately is not a free app but will cost the princely sum of $9.99. There is however a free trial that you can download that shows you how wonderful it actually is.
The marvellous features in the paid version are things like it not disconnecting and reminding you to please pay, free upgrades later and also my all time favourite, it being able to run in the background so you can use other iPhone apps and make and receive calls and not have it drop the internet link while your iPhone is acting as your home’s wireless 3G modem. This requires the installation of SpringBoard which can be done for free via Installer or Cydia on a jailbreaked iPhone (look it up on Google or ask me here if you need guidance). On the link as I have given to Addition’s iPhoneModem 2 are all the instructions and everything you need to know about installing it, paying for it, registering it and other added features.
I hope you enjoy this as much as I do! This has been posted while connected to the internet on my laptop through my iPhone3G and making a phone call at the same time. It doesn’t get much better than this. And if it does I will surely pee in my pants!
Well done guys!
