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The Story of My Discovery
I recently purchased the iPod Touch and was very impressed with it. It makes a wonderful web tablet. I found the on screen keyboard entry to be so good that I found myself wishing this was a full PDA. In fact it could easily be so, except that Apple have artificially restricted it to be a media player.
I immediately had the idea of using web based applications to obtain the PDA functionality. So I tested it out on
Writeboard, and found that Safari was quite capable of editing my documents on there. This was very exciting, but left a couple of problems:
1) The controls on Writeboard are too small and fiddly for the iPod, even after zooming
2) I could only access my documents whilst in range of a WiFi network.
Problem 1 was very quickly solved when I googled for iPhone applications, and found that many people have started working on PDA apps more suited to the iPhone/iPod screen. A good example is
iPhone WebDocs.
Problem 2 meant waiting for the European iPhone to be released and then spending lots of money on another superfluous contract. Even then it would only be usable via the ancient slow 2G network for some reason unfathomable to anyone except Apple. However I quickly had an idea, and set about investigating the possibility!
My idea was to use a Windows Mobile phone as a bridge from 3G to WiFi. Then you could just buy any cheap rubbish Windows phone, stick it in your pocket, and access the net at full 3G speed from a slimline iPod Touch that's even better than an iPhone and without all the cost! The iPod Touch doesn't have a microphone of course, but for voice calls I'd much rather use the normal phone and not look like a total dork by holding an iPod/iPhone to my head ;-)
I only needed to find out if the WiFi bridge was possible and how to do it. A quick trawl of my favourite sites, and I was in luck! I came across the solution on the XDA Developers Network. It took me a short while to set this up and test it, and suddenly I had my iPod Touch accessing the net at full 3.5G HSDPA speed via the Windows phone in my pocket! Below is my step-by-step guide on how you can do it too.
Step-by-Step Guide
On the next page is my step-by-step guide on how to turn your iPod Touch (and iPhone) into a 3.5G iPhone! This is suitable for beginners as it involves no hacking at all of the iPod, and only a simple registry edit on the Windows phone. Click the button below to continue.
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