NetShare…It Works!
When I bought my first iPhone, and read the many reviews online, there was the occasional murmur from geeks wishing for a tethering solution for their iPhone.
Tethering is the process of linking your phone to your computer, and using the phones data connection on your laptop.
While i thought it would be kind of cool, I didn’t really care. The first gen iPhone is EDGE only. We all know that EDGE means SLOW. It’s fine for most iPhone tasks like checking email, getting RSS feeds, and mobile-formatted sites. Otherwise, it is slightly painful to use. That’s really not a good tethering solution.
Fast forward to today, we have the iPhone 3G now. If you are one of the lucky folks who have 3G in your area, tethering becomes a much more plausible thing. The problem is, AT&T still doesn’t have a solution for us iPhone users.
This past week I read an article about a new application in the iTunes App Store. It’s called NetShare – and it let’s you tether your iPhone. As soon as I saw that, I immediately opened the App Store and tried to download it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t! It was gone. The article was less than an hour old, and the app was no longer around. Not sure what the deal was, I just gave up for the moment. That evening, I was browsing the App Store, and decided to look for it again. This time it was available, so I grabbed it.
Tonight, I finally had the opportunity to setup it up. The instructions are very straightforward, but if you need a visual queue, here is a link to a user on the Mac Rumors forum who snapped some screenshots.
Unfortunately, where I live, there is only EDGE. So the speed of it was pretty dismal (as expected) on my Macbook Air:
The important thing for this test though, is that it actually works, which is all I wanted to know. The cool thing will come tomorrow, when I go to work. I work in a city with 3G, and I can’t wait to try it. I’ll upload a speed test after I get a chance tomorrow.
Unfortunately for most folks, even those in 3G areas, the app is once again not available for the moment. Not sure what is going on with the store, but hopefully it comes back for the masses.
Update 08/04/2008:
I brought my laptop to work early today so I could test this out. I was very surprised and pleased at the speed difference:
One thing of note. The connection seems slightly unreliable. I sometimes have to retry page loads, etc, to make it work.
