Dr. Froyo or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tethering

This blog is by Erick, a software engineer here at Junction Networks

I'm Addicted to the Internet

However you look at it, fortunately or not, I have a job that feeds one of my biggest addictions: the internet. Almost every waking hour, I'm online both at work and at home.

Case in point, right now it's 3am and I have every reason to be in bed, but I'm not. I'm up writing on the internet about how addicted I am to it. I'm so addicted to the internet that I spent 4 hours the other day fixing my friend's computer so that he could connect to his newly installed internet connection (if you don't already know this, having 4 pieces of software trying to simultaneously manage your Windows XP wifi is a very nasty thing to sift through). You could actually make a pretty strong case that I have a serious disorder, personally I don't care, I'm fascinated with it. So when I find something that lets me get online more, you could say that I get excited, giddy even...

New Devotion to the Nexus One

For about 2 years I was a devoted iphone 3g user, although like so many other iphone converts I was getting more and more fed up with the closed door policy of the App store. Then, about 2 months ago, I was given a Nexus One to test out some apps for OnSIP. All the apps turned out to be a major bust; but, I had definitely found something special in the Android phone. It was cleaner and more pleasant to use than my girlfriend's earlier Droid (my first Android experience that left a very bad taste in my mouth). And, it seemed to alleviate all the problems I had with my iphone. It was really a phone I could go and use just like my laptop, install whatever software I wanted on it, and tweak all aspects of it without asking anyone's permission. I'm the first to admit it has all kinds of problems... terrible battery life, unintuitive interfaces, and a pretty weak music player. But none of that matters, it just has that je ne sais quoi.

Then, last weekend, my love of my Nexus One and my internet addiction came into a head on collision; I manually updated my AT&T Nexus One to Android 2.2 (froyo). There's about 100 and 1 features they've added or fixed in this update (including Flash, finally!), but the killer feature in this is tethering.

Tethering My Nexus One to My Laptop

Built into the 2.2 firmware is the ability to use your Android phone as a wifi hotspot, to share its internet connection with up to 5 (maybe 6) other wifi devices. This now means I can take my phone and my laptop just about anywhere and have a very solid internet connection - for $0 extra a month.

For instance, at about 6 pm today in downtown Manhattan, I experienced 400kbps bandwidth. It's not speedy, but it's very usable. Anyway, tethering my phone to my laptop is now my new favorite time killer. I just took a bus to Boston last weekend, the bus offered wifi; but, it was slow and locked down. I couldn't ssh into our servers here to do some work; so, instead I tethered my android to my laptop and ssh'd in over 3g also while listening to the U.S. world cup game streaming down to my phone. On the way back, I didn't even bother with the bus wifi, I just went straight to the phone and watched about 4 episodes of south park and a Red Sox game. Let me tell you, a laptop, a power source, and a decent internet connection can really make 6 hours of travel just fly by.

So needless to say, I'll be foregoing the iphone 4 experience and will be continuing on very merrily with Android. I highly recommend it to anyone willing to shell out the $$$ for a game changing piece of equipment.

For those of you with an Android phone and patiently waiting for the 2.2 update, I highly suggest checking out the awesome tethering app pdanet in the meantime. The vendor also offers tethering for other platforms like the iphone, but I believe you need to jailbreak your phone to get it installed.