It’s nice to discover things you didn’t know about. Even better when they have a practical benefit.

My new HTC phone is 3G and can access the Internet at quite good speeds. I initially thought that I’d have little or no use for this function as the included web site content was pretty basic ; a handful of news summaries, movie times, even horoscopes (!) Yes it can access other sites, but the small screen makes it a bit difficult.

But but but. An icon called Internet Sharing changed all that.

Basically it goes like this:

1. Laptop has no Internet connection. You can be sitting in your car or visiting someone etc.
2. Connect Mobile Phone to Laptop (USB cable or even Bluetooth)
3. Start Internet Sharing on Phone
4. Laptop says “okay connecting to Internet via Phone”
5. On the Laptop, browse and email away to any site

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I can see a use for this straight away. A few places I visit – including running training at my local library – have limited Internet access. So I may not be able to ‘see’ the very site I’m trying to teach about ; like Gmail, Google Reader or Flickr. Their firewall or proxy server is doing this.

So I just use the phone as modem.

Another benefit, particularly when visiting a customer, is that I’m not on their network either. So good for security reasons too.