Pocket Tethering!

Yeah, I know, I haven't even given information about what Pocket is, but that'll come...

First off, the web and picture messaging on my Motorola v323i on Pocket mysteriously started working today! Which means I can now get lovely 1x access everywhere Pocket has service. Which isn't everywhere, but it is everywehre I usually go. Which is sweet...

But the sweetness doesn't stop there...

I can tether the phone very easily!

First off, Bluetooth tethering to my trusty Palm TX PDA...

I used one of the Motorola phone models (don't remember which) as the Bluetooth profile to connect my phone to my PDA. I successfully tansferred a picture or two and a movie or two from my phone to my PDA. Then I tried using the phone as a modem...and it worked! What are the settings?

Provider: Dial-up
Username: my10digitnumber@1x.pocket.com
Password: my10digitnumber

And it worked! Slow, yes but we'll talk about that in a minute...

Second, I plugged in my phone to my computer (easy to do as it has a MiniUSB port on the bottom and I have a MiniUSB cable that came with my MP3 player), with the Motorola drivers installed (available from MotoDev, which you can Google, Motorola's developer website). The phone shows up as a modem with these drivers. So all I had to do, on my WIndows Vista RC2 machine, was to input the same dialup parameters as on my PDA and rock out to 1x internet.

Except Pocket's 1x is as slow as molasses for the time being, with what seem to be frequent timeouts and such. Probably because the network is still mainly designed for voice communications, not for data, and thus doesn't have much bandwidth going into the network to start with. Which is sad. But the internet does work...just at speeds that are probably comparable to a 28.8k modem (typical 1x speeds are 50-70k, reaching up to 115k when you do things right and the tower isn't busy...from my experience with Sprint 1x).

But hey, it's cellular internet, and for $5 a month you take what you can get, since it is unlimited. And Pocket will likely upgrade its network fairly soon, at which point things will go faster, and for now it's freakin' sweet to be able to use internet anywhere wirelessly, both network-wise and Bluetooth-wise, for less than dialup access costs. So though I wouldn't yet buy the phone for internet's sake, my verdict at the moment, despite the 200-250 millisecond ping times (actually not bad for 1x service but not great either) and the failure to complete either of the speed tests I tried to execute on it, is "Too Cool".