Before owning an Android phone (Samsung Galaxy S) I had a HTC TyTN II which is a Windows Mobile 6.1 device. Until recently it was lying in a drawer because I didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t want to give it away because I was afraid to turn the new owner into an enemy due the the poor quality of the phone. Anyway I am a so-so happy Android user now.
But recently I had to travel to Italy here and there and I was really lost without an internet connection to my laptop. Sure, I could use roaming, but I am not that rich. I figured out that the cheapest way to get connected in Italy is to buy an Italian prepaid SIM card, from TIM in my case. During the buying process I encountered two peculiarities.
1. The vendor asked me for ID. ID? For prepaid SIM card? I learned that they have this fabulous anti terrorism law in Italy that forbids vending SIM cards to anonymous users. Never heard of it in Slovenia. They even forbid vending more than 4 cards to a single person if I recall correctly. Go figure.
2. The guy asked me whether I want to use internet on my phone or on my laptop. Phone of course, why would I pay a premium price? After all Galaxy S comes with a mobile access point and I though it would be fine. It worked in Croatia just fine. Surprise, surprise, it doesn’t work. It works if I access the internet from my phone but not through an access point. After speaking with a fellow MVP network guru Miha Pihler he figured out that they probably inspect TCP/IP packets for traces of NAT and in such cases block the traffic.
One solution to this problem was to switch my Slovene SIM card in Galaxy S with the Italian one each time I travelled to Italy. There are two shortcoming to this solution. It is annoying to switch them again and again and I still couldn’t access internet from my laptop. Hey, I could buy a cheap GPRS modem. Hm, those aren’t that cheap after all, specially because I don’t need it that often.
At this point I remembered my old crappy TyTN II lying in the drawer. I also remembered that there is a really nice internet tethering application out there called WMWiFiRouter. Combining the two and using Bluetooth PAN feature it was a matter of minutes for connecting my laptop through bluetooth to TyTN II to the Italian internet. It is just that easy - a matter of starting the application and clicking a button. Besides Bluetooth PAN WMWiFiRouter can share cellular internet connection through USB and WiFi and much much more, see the features list.
The bottom line is that I finally found a good use for TyTN II and found a good internet tethering application as well which I’d definitely recommended.