AT&T and Apple supposedly are in negotiations to bring tethering to the iPhone.
Currently I have a Palm 700p on Sprint. The Palm OS is crusty and doesn't allow using the USB device to tether with my Macbook, but it does good enough to check email and interact with my teams when I'm on the road. It doesn't do WiFi, but my laptop does, so no big deal there. Thing is, Sprint has now imposed a 3gb per month limit, so that pretty much eliminated any reason to prefer Sprint's 3G to anybody else's 3G (well, other than the fact that they have a better build-out than their competitors, but that's another issue). And the Palm OS is just plain crusty, this thing hasn't been enhanced with anything new for ten years now and is woefully obsolete.
Of course, the Palm OS is also the only handheld OS that allows one-handed operation. I've tried Windows Mobile 5+ and nope, it requires two-handed operation, which is a bummer when you're sitting in the restroom wiping your bum while trying to find out what the news of the world is on your handheld's web browser. With Palm OS, you just hit the 'menu' button, use the rocker to move down to 'Bookmarks' and hit the center rocker button, and voila. Choose the pre-programmed news site you're interested in. You can flip through the list of available programs by just hitting the 'home' button repeatedly, and once you have the page you're interested in, use the rocker and the center button.
The problem is that Palm's built-in web browser doesn't work very well, and the OS is too limited for any other web browser to really work. Whereas the iPhone has Safari in it. Which isn't the world's best browser, but which is quite usable (it's what I'm using to type this message, due to the fact that, unlike Firefox, it doesn't have memory leaks out the wazoo and never freezes up). So if I could tether an iPhone as well as get my address book and TODO lists and etc. out of the Palm into the iPhone, it'd look a lot more like an alternative to me. So anywho... I'll have to see what happens there. Geekery never ends, apparently!
-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin
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