For the past few years I’ve been able to connect to the Internet while on the road with my cell phone and a USB cable.  Verizon has offered a connection service that uses your voice minutes.  It’s not a high speed service, but you can send and receive e-mail while on the road.  Looking at high graphics web sites wasn’t advisable though, it would just take too long.

Within the past few months I’ve gotten a new IBook G4 with Bluetooth built in, and a new Motorola e815 phone that also has Blue Tooth.  What’s Blue Tooth?  It is another wireless protocol, and it is very short range.  Many new Blue Tooth phones offer wireless hands free devices.  Little boom mics, wireless speakers, etc.  The function using the blue tooth wireless interface.

Blue Tooth can also be used between cell phones and computers, PDAs, etc.  Any device that is Blue Tooth capable.  So, the other day I finally decided to see if I could get my Mac to talk to my new phone via Blue Tooth.  It didn’t take long to find out they could communicate!  And it was relatively simple to set up.

Using the Blue Tooth connection, my Macintosh synchronized with the phone.  They exchanged phone book & address book information, and calendar information!  Nice.  If I add a number to my phone, then connect via Blue Tooth to my laptop, the number will be updated there too.

But just syncing between phone and computer isn’t cool enough to rate a long post.  So, what else can you do with a Blue Tooth connection between your computer and phone?  How about connect to the Internet?  Yes, you can do that too.

I’ve been considering purchasing Verizon’s High Speed Wireless service for a while now.  When you get the service ($59.99 per month, with 2 year contract) they send you a PCMCIA card to put in your computer to connect to their network.  Unfortunately, my IBook has no slot for a PCMCIA card.  What to do, what to do?

Well, with my phone’s blue tooth connection, and given that it is a “data ready phone”, I can use the phone to access the high speed service instead of the card that Verizon would provide me.

I found another fantastic blog, with step by step instructions for setting up the Motorola e815 to act as a modem fory a macintosh laptop.  Rather than reproducing a great document I’ll provide a link right here. The author, Jason Gilstrap did a great job of documenting the how to’s!  His site is worth a visit.

While this only applies to folks who are on Verizon and using the e815, don’t discount this post.  If you have a data ready phone on a different network, you’ll still be able to find out how to set your phone up as well.  A simple google search will get you going.  Or, worst case scenario, drop me a line and I’ll be happy to research and send you an answer!

Looks like I’ll be signing up for the high speed service soon, now that I’ve tested the connection out and found that it works to my liking.  On the low speed #777 connection that I tested I found my download speed to be 144kbps, and upload to be 96 kbps.  Not bad for a service that only uses my minutes.  But if I want to do large scale web work from the road, it’s time to step up to the higher bandwidth services!