Monday, November 9, 2009

I've got the Droid now what? Tethering...



I showed up at the Verizon store at 7a.m. and was the 9th person in line to get the Droid. It was a light rain and my bagel was damp, but that didn't matter. I hadn't been this excited since the batman costume was available for my 5th birthday around Halloween. One potential Verizon Droid customer in the store was dissappointed when he determined the droid may not synch with a Mac home computer, but overall the crowd seemed happy to dump their Blackberry for the bigger screen and keyboard. My daughter wanted one too, but she wants everything new and shiny.

Now I've got the phone and all seems well, except that it eats up batteries and the screen may be getting looser from use sliding it back and forth to use the keypad. I'm about ready to port in my AT&T phone number, but I'm not 100% convinced this phone is going to allow me to tether my laptop to the internet without having to pay an extra $30 a month. I've downloaded an FTP app and setup my Gmail account to access Google, but I didn't instantly get access to all of my Google apps like Adwords and Adsense. I may be able to reach them through a browser which with the bigger screen makes the web more accessible.


Tethering the Droid: Here is what I've found out so far. JuneFabrics has a software for this here, JuneFabrics, but once I attempt to download the software it claims that I can't because it is not supported by the Droid / Verizon. I may have to manually download the file and transfer it over. Basically I think I can do most of my network solutions by simply FTP, email and Web browsing, but for the special circumstance when I need to print a label and communicate with other software I feel this may be too difficult to manage on the Droid or a Blackberry or an Iphone, but I can't afford another $30 a month. This always brings me back to a high tech phone is still only 1/2 a computer and more of a fun expensive toy when it comes to doing anything useful. If I could spend $30 a month and have internet everywhere, then I wouldn't need these fancy phones. It really is the contracts I hate for these services more than the money. I hate being locked into 2 years for something that will most likely be free and or cheaper in a matter of months. Other Droid Tethering articles

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