Someone told me the other day that this is already a reality. How does it work? What specific equipment do you need? Or will it work with any laptop and cell phone? It would be great to keep up with the SDMB and everything while I’m out on the road. Or download driving directions in a pinch.
You can get one of these, which is a type III PCMCIA card that you put in your laptop. It acts as a cell modem, as a normal modem on a land line, or as a cell phone using a mic and headphones and your laptop.
Just look around for cell modem. There’s digital and analog and everything else. If you prefer to have a seperate phone, you can get setups with a modem in the computer connected to a cell phone via a cable. Some cell phones have a modem built in.
You can connect your cellphone to your PC with a cable or make use of the infrared connections on the PC and cellphone.
If the phone does not have a internal modem you can install a software modem on the your PC which then uses your cellphone like a normal phone to connect to your ISP. I only played with the Nokia products. Have a look here:
http://www.nokia.co.za/Data/DataSuite/Home.asp
I’ve got mine set up to use the IR port - As I recall Windows XP detected the phone automatically and setting up the IR modem was a breeze - everything else after that was just the same as any other dialup connection (albeit a bit slower).
What about bluetooth phone?
will this be a feature of bluetooth as well?
I have been debating getting a new bluetooth phone, but I want to witch back to Verizon service, and verizon doesn’t offer any bluetooth phones in my area(NJ)
I have AT&T and the service is not as good as my previous Verizon service.
so do I upgrade the service or the features of the phone?
Pretty sure this is almost the standard application of bluetooth - if you have an enabled laptop and phone, it should pretty much set itself up.
I’ve done it with my Mac PowerBook and an Ericsson mobile phone, using a special PC (PCMCIA) Card and an adapter cable.
Like the rest of my experience with #$^@!! cell phones, I kept losing the connection and having to redial. (It was to dial into a Timbuktu connection, fortunately, so every time I reconnected and logged back on, the work I’d been working on was right there waiting for me).
If I had to use a wireless connection to connect to an environment that would require extensive work to reestablish if the connection broke (such as connecting to a remote database and setting up some reports or something), the technology as I’ve experienced it would be unusably subfunctional.
I’m sure it’s already gotten a lot better, though. (Also there are other wireless alternatives that are far more reliable. There used to be a fast wireless LAN service called Ricochet which was close to being a 56K connection, established with a dedicated Merlin PC Card, available in a few major cities. It’s successors will probably use an 802.11x standard connection.)
While it is possible to connect a laptop to some cell phones, with many the resultant bandwidth (“speed”) is quite limited, maybe to the point of not worth doing.
I have a Motorola StarTAK phone about 1 yr old, and the guy at Verizon talked me out of getting the cable to use with my laptop. He said I’d only get a max of 14,000 bps (dial-up modems are 56,000 bps) and that would be near worthless for anything but the simplest email.
Improvements are being made to cell phones as they goto “2.5G” and “3G” technology - they’re sending pictures over some cell phones now - but ask about bandwidth or connection speed before you spend any money.
There are ways to get better bandwidth; Orange(UK) offers a high speed data service with a (probably theoretical) speed of something like 36K and there are GPRS services available where the bandwidth can be higher than a land line dialup, if the cell isn’t terribly busy at the time.
I get a 24K connection and it’s fine for downloading emails; I’ve even browsed the board here on it and it’s not all that different to using a 56K dialup on my home line - I think the client modem isn’t the bottleneck for the SDMB.
been there, done that
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=82615&highlight=wireless+post+from+the
Basically verizon wireless offers an isp with their service. All i needed is a cable to connect my phone to my laptop and.or pda.
It works great but eats through minutes
I’ve used the Verizon Wireless service. You connect a special cable from certain types of phone to a USB port. I was consistantly getting 40kbps which isn’t bad (remember lots of ordinary phone lines don’t always get a full 56k).
The 40k speed only works if you’re connecting to Verizon’s ISP though, because it uses their compression software. You only get 14k if you have to connect to another ISP.
There are different plans depending on how many hours you want. The unlimited plan is $100 per month, but it seems to be really unlimited (though it will disconnect you after too much idle time), and you can always get online quickly.
It runs the phone’s battery down pretty quick though.
you are mixing their new high speed service with their ‘moblie office’ isp. Their mobile office isp is just minutes and connects at 14.4 (maybe 19.6). you can connect to your own isp but verizon provieds an isp anyway - either way t’s just minutes. Their high speed service (max 144 kb/s) cost apx $100 for unlimited service.