Helper apps for cell phone tethering?

zo0o0ot

Does anyone have suggestions for applications that ease the complication of "tethering" cellular phones to laptops for Internet access? I provide volunteer tech support for a guy that often travels to Kenya and India, and he was able to tether his cell phone and access the Internet in previous trips with a different Redmond based OS, but struggled to get the phone to connect to his Asus eee 901 running Ubuntu-eee 8.04. I understand that the OS is older, and I am hoping for suggestions on newer netbook distros that streamline this process instead of requiring manually edited wvdial.conf files and the like. The user of this laptop is relatively new to Linux, and I will not be in Kenya or India with him when he attempts to access the internet via 3G and 4G networks.

Thanks!

cmdln

With a jailbroken iphone you can get PdaNet from Cydia. Essentially a pocket access point. DHCP server and everything.

zo0o0ot

Sorry, I forgot to mention what phone he has. I'm pretty sure he has a Nokia e61i. If there was something that could run on the Symbian OS, that'd be great. I had been too focused on the laptop to think about making life easier on the phone side- good point.

Flu

I have a Nokia N95 and frequently use the Joikuspot application available for the S60 platform (http://www.joikushop.com/?action=products&mode=productDetails&product_id=33). It turns your phone into a standard wireless hotspot, so any laptop that has a wireless card should be able to connect to the phone to make use of it's 3G connection.

The only downside I've found with the software is that it rapidly drains my battery. Because of this, I try to make sure that I have my phone plugged in to an outlet while I'm using it.

zo0o0ot

Thank you very much! It looks like exactly the thing I need!
:woohoo: