Post date: 02-Jun-2009 10:09:29
Seems like a simple request, doesn't it? "How can I share my phone's internet connection with my computer?" Well for G1 users it's a little more complicated than it seems...
Luckily the European T-Mobile TOS don't aren't similarly crippled, and I found some solutions that don't require root access - but I spent quite a few hours wrestling with this, so I thought I'd post a few notes about my experiences.
PDANet looked nicest, initially - a simple client on the PC side that could install and then connect to a little phone-side app. Problems cropped up pretty fast, though - I had trouble finding help on their site, and once I was up and running, well, I wasn't up and running very long... the connection dropped regularly. Also they only provide clients for different versions of Windows, leaving Mac and Linux users out in the cold.
Tetherbot turned out to be the best solution for me. It involved a little more tweaking, but as a developer working on multiple OSes it delivered what I needed - reliable connectivity. it works by providing a SOCKS proxy on your machine, connecting via the Android debugging tools to an app on the phone. That might sound complicated, but if you've already got the Android SDK installed (as I have) the remaining steps are simple. (And if you don't, you can get just the bits you need from a link on the Tetherbot site.) From that point on my real stumbling block turned out to be Firefox - SOCKS proxying just wouldn't work for me. Safari was quite happy to connect, though, and current advice is that the FoxyProxy Firefox add-on is all things to all SOCKS users. :)
Mucking around with SOCKS settings and dealing with T-Mobile's uneven connectivity in my area means that this isn't a permanent solution. But hopefully it'll get me through the 4 to 6 week lead time currently suffered by those of us in the Netherlands trying to get ADSL...