Using the iPhone as a Modem
Let’s say you’re on the road. And let’s say you have to upload photos to a remote server, for instance a photo agency. You have your laptop with the jpg photo. And you have an iPhone… Now what?
To use the iPhone as a modem to connect your mobile computer to the internet, you need an application on the iPhone which routes data coming in from your laptop (via WLAN) to the UMTS / EDGE / GPRS phone network. There is no modem application doing this in Apple’s App Store. But…
For those who dare to jailbreak their iPhone, there are several applications however. One of these modem apps is PdaNet. It’s downloadable via Cydia and easy to use. You create a Peer-to-Peer network on your Mac. Then you join this network on your iPhone to connect it to your laptop. Then you launch PdaNet on the iPhone and voilà! There you are. It takes about 1.5 minutes to upload a 3.6 megabyte photo to an FTP server via 3G-UMTS phone network (that’s about 2.4 MB per minute).