HOW TO: Use your mobile phone as a modem for your Mac

I’ve wanted to try this out for a while now, and it works surprisingly well. In fact, I’m using it to type this post. Anyways, onto the ‘how-to’.

What you’ll need is a laptop or desktop Mac (I’m on a Macbook) and a mobile phone that supports bluetooth and a 3G connection of sorts (any kind of data transfer connection should work fine). Let me first lay out what we’re aiming to do here, step by step. We want to connect our laptop or desktop to the phone via bluetooth, and to use the phone’s data connection as a means of accessing the web. Here’s how we do this:

1. Activate bluetooth on your mobile phone and on your Mac. On the Mac, this should be done in the System Preferences area. You should see a bluetooth icon at the top of your screen.

2. Right-click the bluetooth icon and select “setup mobile device”.

3. On this setup screen, select the device as a “mobile phone”. From there, select the device (once detected). On the next screen, select your phone model and the GPRS option. Your username and password are both ‘guest’ and the APN is ‘internet’.

4. On the final screen, check the checkbox, allowing the phone’s data connection to be used.

5. You should now have a telephone icon on the top of your screen. If you right-click this icon and select “connect”, you will be asked on your mobile device whether you want to accept connections. Select “yes”. You should now be connected.

This is a simple, effective and somewhat reliable way to get online from anywhere. Your phone’s airtime will be used, as per with conventional data transfers. If you use a data bundle, the transfers will be deducted off of the bundle.

I hope you’ve found this useful and will use it and let me know what you think. Bare in mind that the connection acts more like a dial-up connection and can drop at times. Hopefully it won’t happen too often though.