Palm and Treo Hacks

Use Your Treo as a Modem

Use your Treo to connect your laptop to the Internet. You can also use your Treo as a backup Internet connection for your desktop machine.

If you’ve signed up for your carrier’s wireless data plan, you can get the entire Internet on your Treo. It may not seem like it at times, because the small screen can really constrain your web-browsing experience when compared to, say, your laptop or your desktop computer, but it’s all there—every last byte. Better still, it is possible to feed the Internet connection of your Treo through to your laptop computer. This is called tethering, and it allows your tethered laptop to work with the Internet as if it were connected via a normal dial-up, cable, or DSL modem—only, you are connected using your Treo. Anywhere your Treo has enough signal strength to connect to its wireless data service, you can tether it to supply a laptop with Internet.

Tip

You can also channel your Treo’s Internet connection through your computer [Hack #34] if you wish. Though it’s not as convenient as using your Treo as a modem, it does come in handy if your desktop’s Internet connection happens to be down.

Setting up tethering is specific to the model of your Treo and your cellular service provider and is summed up in Table 5-2. You use either your Treo 650’s Bluetooth connectivity to use the Treo as a wireless modem for your laptop or desktop, or you need a third-party Windows application called PdaNet, which allows you to connect your Treo (as ...