If your cellular provider's mobile hotspot/tethering plans are as well pricey, skip them and tether your phone to your estimator without inflating your monthly bill. Read on to see how you can score free mobile internet.

We recently received a letter from a How-To Geek reader, requesting help linking their Android phone to their laptop to avert the highway robbery their cellular provider was insisting upon:

Love How-To Geek,

I recently plant out that my cellphone visitor charges $30 a month to use your smartphone as a information modem. That'southward an outrageous price when I already pay an extra $15 a month charge simply because they insist that because I have a smartphone I need a information programme because I'll be using and so much more data than other users. They expect me to pay what amounts to a $45 a month premium just to do some occasional surfing and e-mail checking from the comfort of my laptop instead of the much smaller smartphone screen! Surely there is a work around? I'm running Windows 7 on my laptop and I have an Android phone running Android Os 2.2. Help!

Sincerely,

No Double Dipping!

Well Double Dipping, this is a sentiment nosotros can strongly related to as many of u.s.a. on staff are in a similar state of affairs. It's cool that so many companies accuse you lot to use the information connection on the phone y'all're already paying for. There is no difference in bandwidth usage if y'all stream Pandora to your phone or to your laptop, for example.

Fortunately we have a solution for you. It'southward not free-equally-in-beer only information technology just costs $16 which, over the offset year of employ alone, will save you $344. Allow's become started!

What Y'all'll Need

In order to tether your telephone to your laptop equally a data modem, without having to root your device, you'll need the following things on manus:

  • Your Android phone
  • Your laptop, netbook, or desktop computer y'all wish to tether
  • A USB sync cable for your Android phone
  • A copy of PdaNet for your Android Phone
  • A copy of PdaNet for your computer

PdaNet costs $xv.95 and comes with a complimentary trial. You tin keep using it indefinitely but after the trial ends you volition no longer be able to visit secure web sites. If you lot're merely using the tether for goofing off on your break at work then you may never need to upgrade. For checking your e-mail, banking web sites, shopping, and other secure applications however information technology is more worth it to upgrade your license.

Notation: Although we're using an Android device and a Windows machine for this tutorial PdaNet is available for a diverse array of devices. You can get the mobile component of PdaNet for Android phones, iPhones, BlackBerries, Windows Mobile phones, and even the Palm OS. The desktop component is available for both Windows and Mac OS Ten. The following setup steps should easily interpret beyond the various combinations of mobile and desktop components.

Installing PdaNet on Your Android Device

First, search the Android Market for PdaNet (if you're curious why there are duplicate copies of the search results in our Market search, that's a mystery best left to the Google engineers). On the off take chances that there are future applications with a like proper name, make certain to install the one from June Fabrics Technology Inc.

Get ahead and run the awarding one time it has finished installing.

Tap "Enable USB Tether" to turn it on. You tin can also do a wireless tether using Bluetooth only we're skipping that for at present. Bluetooth can exist so finicky we don't want you to become mired down in trying to figure out why your Bluetooth connection is acting up. When you enable it for the first time it volition prompt you, as seen in the terminal panel, to download the desktop software. This is handy for those times yous're stuck without any internet simply the internet on your phone and demand to download and transfer the application to your figurer. In our instance we clicked No, since the computer we're configuring already has internet access and nosotros can download the desktop app that way.

Installing PdaNet on Your Desktop

Installing the desktop software is pretty uneventful and requires no configuration. There are, still, a few things to watch out for.

If you have the Android Deveopment toolkit on your computer (every bit you may have if you followed forth with our guide to remote controlling and viewing your Android phone) you'll run across two potential errors. If the abd.exe is running you lot'll take to kill the process with Task Manager. You'll as well get a notification that there are Android drivers already installed on the computer. When in incertitude overwrite the drivers with the new ones from PdaNet to ensure you lot can connect to the internet properly. After the installation you'll see the PdaNet icon in the corner.

It should automatically connect when y'all plug your phone (with the USB tethering enabled) into your computer. If it doesn't, right click on the icon and select Connect Internet. Success!

Have an Android hack to share? Let's hear about information technology in the comments. Want to know how to exercise something on your Android phone? We desire to hear most that likewise.