Using Your Cell Phone as a Bluetooth Modem

Get online via your Bluetooth-enabled cellphone and AT&T’s GPRS service with these comprehensive instructions.

With Bluetooth finally hailed as a strong buy, it’s surprising how little detailed information there is on actually using your new Bluetooth-enabled phone with Mac OS X. When I went searching for instructions on setting up my Sony Ericsson T68i to allow my Mac to connect to the Internet via AT&T Wireless Services GPRS (a.k.a. mMode) service, I wasn’t able to find anything comprehensive. I have been able to piece together instructions from other sites to form a working solution, though. This hack offers step-by-step instructions for getting online via Bluetooth and AT&T mMode.

Tip

This hack assumes you are running Mac OS X 10.2 (aka Jaguar) and have a Sony Ericsson T68i mobile phone and iSync via Bluetooth [Hack #32]. For the purposes at hand, make sure both Address Book and Internet Access are checked (as shown in Figure 6-43) and click OK.

Choosing services to use with the phone

Figure 6-43. Choosing services to use with the phone

Now that your phone and Mac are able to talk to each other, we’ll work on treating your phone as a Bluetooth modem. Click the Bluetooth menu bar icon and select Open Network Preferences, which will report New Port Detected. Click OK.

From the Location pop-up menu, select New Location . . . , name it Bluetooth, and click OK. From the Show ...

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