For those of you using laptops on the road and paying for internet service. If you have a phone that has 3G you might want to look into tethering. It’s where you connect your phone to the laptop and can surf the web. I was forced to do this a couple weeks ago and I will say was very impressed with the speed. Much like a home broadband connection. I use tmobile and the service is free with my data plan. I heard verizon and att charge for it. But you might want to look into how much they charge because if you factor in the cost of a usb device and the data plan. It might be cheaper just to tether and pay as you go. A buddy of mine in Iraq has been doing this for the last 6 months. But his costs are crazy. He pays $0.50 per min. But when he factored in the cost of a sat connection and the speed dffernence he figured he was better off with the tether. But for you road warriors, might be something worth checking into.
Hey Ray that’s a good idea to post here. I’ve been using this app called PdaNet its free from the android market, its free by the way. Just remember to check with your service provider if they don’t charge extra for tethering. I heard UNLIMITED data is not unlimited for verizon, sprint and at&t they have ther limit to 5gigs of data usage. After that they can terminate your contract.
Great tip! If you do this, you want to take a close look at how you do it. Blackberry’s got a built in feature to be used as a soft modem (aka tethered internet device). There are a couple of apps on the cydia market for jailbroken iphones. There is some question regarding the ethics of using these programs, though, since they probably violate your usage agreement- and if you’re tethering all the time, your provider will probably find out 
I have a Palm Pre, it comes standard with a mobile hot spot app that turns the phone into a wi-fi device. Very cool indeed.
What network are you on Steve?
Yeah I like the PDANet also. But have went over to easy tether. PDA started to crash my phone for some reason. There is a program out there that will turn the phone into a wifi router which looks nice. But you need root access to the phone and I’m not risking turning my phone into a brick. In fact I’m posting here over the tethered phone.
For those of you who are a little unsure of how this works. You basicly download an application on to your phone. Then you install that application on your laptop also. You run through some configuration wizards, and the next time you plug in your phone to the usb cable you have the option of turning into an internet connection. When I use mine I am also charging the phone at the same time and can make phone calls while connected to the usb cable. It’s a pretty painless process.
If I would have known about this in the past I would have signed up with quickbooks online and did everything this way when I was on the road. I would have printed invoices, emailed invoices etc all from the road on one laptop. But no need to now for me. Again like others have said, check with your service provider cause most charge. I have tmobile and it is free with your data plan. If the company is giving you 5 gigs of data usage. That’s a TON of transfer. Figure window cleaning resource’s index page is 63.02441 Kilobytes or 0.00006 Gigabytes. So as you see you can prob surf around the net all month and never have an issue with overage.
Verizon
