On arriving in Hong Kong at the beginning of 2007, I bought a MacBook Pro and an HTC Trinity phone (badged as a Dopod D810) running WM5, which has (in theory at least) a 3.6Mbps connection, for which I chose the unlimited download option. My grand idea was that I was not going to go for a home internet connection, since I was planning to kick the TV habit, and I thought I might save a little by not having cable TV, and that this could go towards paying for wireless internet over HSDPA.
I was therefore rather disappointed when I found that I couldn't just connect the two out of the box. On doing some research, I came upon Ross Barkman's site which covers ways of connecting Macs to the internet via phone modem scripts (using DUN, whatever that is!), but couldn't get my Mac to recognise the fact that I had connected the phone to it when I tethered it with a USB cable, and had no idea on how to get the phone to appear under "DUN" anyway!
Happily I then discovered that the latest upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4 (can't remember which) included increased support for Bluetooth, and that I could switch on "Internet Sharing" on my WM5 phone, and then pair the two and get a connection that way. The one downside was that the connection was really slow, and it was common to find myself getting 15kB/s download speed (hope I have the bit vs byte thing right).
As a result I kept on looking for a way to use the USB connection (which would have the added benefit of charging the phone while using it - networking drains the phone's batteries quite quickly). At some point I ended up buying Missing Sync from Mark/Space, and I found that if I interrupted the connection process I would end up being able to see the internet through the connection. This increased the download speed to around 50kB/s, which made me very happy! It wasn't ideal since it didn't work every time and I couldn't work out what the exact sequence was, in a repeatable way.
The next thing that happened was that Dopod (since purchased by HTC) offered a free upgrade to WM6, which I then installed (which required a flashing of the phone chip). At that point the Mark/Space "solution" no longer worked, so I contacted them, and got the following answer.
Hello
The protocols for the communication has changed for Internet sharing and it does not work when using RNDIS and Missing Sync for Windows Mobile. We simply do not support all the protocols that allow this to happen. We're looking into it for the future.
Please let me know if I can be of any further assistance to you. Have a great day.
Best regards,
La'Keith
Mark/Space Inc.
Sales Representative
Unfortunately, receiving that email did not result in me "having a great day", but I cannot really blame them.
So, the summary appears to be that RNDIS does not work with Macs, and that the Mac solution, which appears to be called "CDC Networking" does not work with "Internet Sharing" on WM6 (and I would have thought that it would be unlikely ever to).
Although I could have tried to re-flash my phone back to WM5, I decided that it was a little too risky for me, and I have been enjoying the GPS and Google Maps that came with WM6. My current work-around is that I have found that Windows XP running in VMWare is able to connect to the phone using RNDIS, so I can surf the internet and download most of what I want to using that method (but only when I start Windows up). I would rather go with a Mac solution, but it just isn't fast enough. Apple Software updates are a bit of a problem since they take so long to download using the Bluetooth method, but I just have to do that overnight. I also have to remember to place the phone on something cool when I do that, as it tends to overheat which breaks the connection. Overheating also appears to be a problem with the Mac, and the Bluetooth function sometimes disappears because of that as well... but that is another story...
Looking to the future. I will want to upgrade my phone at some point, and now that I have purchased software for it, it would seem to make sense to stick with Windows Mobile. In general it works fine, apart from the occasional crash... oh, and the fact that the password protection seems to kill the media player (which was one of the reasons I bought a PDA phone - to combine functions and simplify things). However, it doesn't look as though there will be a fix any time soon to let me use my Mac tethered to a WM6 phone. Perhaps I will just go for an iPhone - once the data connection specification has improved (i.e. from 3G to HSDPA or better). Perhaps I will sign up for cable at home... Perhaps I could get DUN to work - I wonder whether it is still possible with WM6?
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