Sure, PDANet gained acceptance on the Android Market. Thanks to how Android is built, open apps can’t be locked out of creation. A quarter-million downloads of PDANet off-market later, and Google told the carriers to stuff it.
Today’s events however are simply timed for comedic effect.
It was expected that Palm would sign on to Verizon’s planned effort to add mobile hotspot service as a $30/month billed feature today. Android phones on Verizon will gain the same feature later this year. But RIM chose to buck that trend, and offer TetherBerry on the RIM App World. The app was required to be re-branded simply as ‘Tether’ but is otherwise unchanged. And, unlike Verizon’s mobile hotspot initative, Tether has no monthly fees, a la PDANet.
This is significant as it is the first time a device manufacturer has offered, for sale, a one-time use app that enables tethering on their portal deck (the App World).
Thanks to the FCC’s Comcast/BitTorrent ruling, consumers do not need to purchase expensive tethering add-ons to tether… but carriers are not required to support, or even ensure such options are available on a device.
This enforces the need for devices to have open application standards, as jailbroken iPhones and Palm Pre/Pixi devices can enable the same tethering capacity. Palm supports homebrew and jailbreaking, even going so far as to thank the community for doing so today. And, of course, Windows Mobile and Symbian have offered similar options for years in native, open apps. This leaves Apple as the odd man out in both repelling jailbreaking, and not offering an open application distribution method.
In a world where wireless customers are taking advantage of the Comcast/BitTorrent ruling, RIM’s move today underlines that companies are starting to realize that their customers are indeed end-users, and not the carriers.
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My friend has a jailbroken iphone and he is sending it in for repairs and is afraid they are going to send him a new one that can’t be jailbroken. I love the smoothness of the iphone and the os on it but it is not worth all the hassle that apple and att put you through. I love being able to connect my phone to my laptop anywhere I’m at and have highspeed internet access. Come on, bring on the Nexxus. I love that they preinstalled tethering. Hopefully sprint will just not support tethering but continue allowing it on their phones.
I have been using TetherBerry aka Tether for over a year!! Its a great piece of software and now supports bluetooth tethering!!
The only down side is you can sling wi-fi to an i-pod touch.
Palm’s app for hotspot tethering was all over the CES blogs. What they didn’t say is that it will be a BILLABLE service. Oh, how naieve of me to have possibly thought otherwise. This IS Verizon, after all.
As for Blackberries, what are PDANet and TetherBerry for? I thought BB’s were tetherale via the desktop manager right out of the box, no?
jimA, tethering commonly refers to using your phone as a modem to connect to the internet. You are thinking of a machine being connected to a computer for syncing, which is completely different.
Jim/Christopher:
Jim is correct. BB Desktop Manager 5.0.1 provides modem capabilities but carriers do charge extra for the service. Tetherberry circumvents the need to pay the additonal cost.
I myself have used usbmodem and pdanet. But recently I have been using the internet sharing on the windows phone and also wifi router which works awesome since it works just like having a wifi connection. The wifi router works the best although using a usb cable may get faster speeds.
Tethering is one of the reasons I have stayed with windows mobile plus I have a taken advantage of the different roms they offer for the touch pro and found one that works awesome (way better than the sprint stock rom).
I hope the nexxus comes to sprint.