I covered in a 2 part series the new MMS and tethering capabilities built into iPhone 3.0. You can find them here:

iPhone 3.0 MMS & Tethering: Part 1

iPhone 3.0 MMS & Tethering: Part 2

In this article I wanted to get more specific and focus on my experience tethering my 3.0 enabled iPhone 3G (note not the 3G S) with my recently purchased iMac (running OS 10 Leopard).

First thing I had to do was turn on Bluetooth on the iPhone. I normally don’t deal with Bluetooth devices so I leave the radio off. Plus it’s a good idea to save on battery life by turning it off. The iMac (which wonderfully has Bluetooth available) wasn’t listed on the devices list, even after I made it discoverable (the iMac that is).

I decided then to go through the device setup wizard available through the Bluetooth configuration icon in the status bar.

On the second page of the wizard there was an option for “Mobile Phone”. I chose that to proceed.

A search page then appeared as it tried to locate (from 2 feet away mind you) my iPhone. It took a moment but it showed up and I was able to select the device to continue. The iMac said that it needed to gather some bits of data about my device (no idea what) but after that I had a code popup on my iPhone which matched a code appearing the iMac screen.

The popup display on the iPhone indicated that a paring was occurring and I had to click OK to permit this. I did. However the pairing came up unsuccessful.

I tried a couple combinations of turning off Bluetooth and back on, switching the discover mode on the iMac to restarting the wizard but I wasn’t having much luck.

I eventually stumbled on the solution (no stopping for directions for this guy!). I had to be on the Bluetooth settings page on the iPhone with it scanning for devices. I then let the wizard attempt to pair with the phone. When the wizard came up with the code, I clicked the OK to permit prompt on the iPhone and then went back to the wizard to click continue.

Success! I could then setup a network connection through the iPhone.

In the Bluetooth settings page (use the Open Bluetooth Preferences from the status bar icon) you will see your paired device and details about it:

All you have to do is click the device and connect! (click the little settings cog wheel next to the minus sign).

So really this is a simple process, and a wireless one at that, much better solution that having to carry around a dock connector.

I did a few connection speed tests to measure the performance (excuse my lousy net speed!)

This is my broadband DSL connection (above)

And here is the tethered test.

About 100 kb/s off on the download, but significantly bad on the download. That is OK with me, since if I was using my iPhone for net access, I would likely really only care about the download speed.

This post originally appeared on DavidRStorms.com on August 10th, 2009

On my last post I talked about the new MMS features with regards to sending pictures in the iPhone 3.0 software update. In this article, I will document my experience trying out the tethering capabilities built right into the iPhone. Now like MMS, tethering technologies have been available on other platforms for years, and without jail-breaking your iPhone, you couldn’t do it previously.

The iPhone is only available on 2 carriers in Canada: Fido and Rogers. I am with Rogers and at launch of the 3.0 update they were one of the carriers that were ready to support tethering. I had to dig a bit to find out what were the conditions of tethering, can I do it now? Will I be charged a ton of money to do it? Do I need some kind of tethering enabled plan?

I managed to find this blurb on the Rogers web site:

So lucky me I already have a 1 GB data plan so I wasn’t worried about incurring charges. And it seems that I have until the end of the year to enjoy this. I haven’t seen anything yet as to what happens in 2010, but I’ll keep digging. A good resource for this is the forums at iphoneincanada.ca where they have a thread on iPhone plans that people can post.

Tethering

This is incredibly easy to do. My first test was with connecting the iPhone to my Windows Vista PC using the dock connector cable that comes with the phone. I made sure wireless was off and the ethernet cable was unplugged and that I had no internet access.

First up is you go to Settings, General and then Network to see this screen:

Click into Internet Tethering to get this screen:

You toggle the ON/OFF and almost immediately are are setup, when you go back to the home screen a nice little blue bar indicates that tethering is enabled:

It’s very similar to when you exit a call to go to the home screen, only not green but blue. When you think about it, it makes sense and is handy to know so that you don’t leave it on and suck up all the bandwidth on your account.

When charging and the phone is locked, you still get the blue indicator:

When I went back to my Vista PC, a new prompt came up:

I choose Home just to get rid of this screen and that was it. I fired up my browser and hit my first web page on tethering:

On the final part I will show the Bluetooth connection with my new iMac and visit a speed testing web site.

Note: this article originally appeared on DavidRStorms.com on August 3rd.

One of the exciting additions to the iPhone in the recent firmware update is the ability to send multi-media messages (pictures and video) the same as text messages. This is nothing new to the mobile phone market, as these features have been staples in products for many years. Could be that these things were left off the release table for Apple until now because it was too much work for them to get it in the phone, or they were planning ahead for future firmware releases and didn’t want to use up everything on their feature list!

Regardless, it is here on the iPhone and it is amazing! Also coming along with the update is the Internet tethering capability which had not been available to non jail-broken phones.

MMS

Unfortunately I wish that I had a 3G S phone so that I could test the video side of this, but alas I only have the 3G, so I will only cover my experience with pictures taken by the camera on the phone.

First thing you will see when you open the Messages app (used to be called a speech bubble called SMS but that wouldn’t make sense now would it!) you will notice near the text bar a small camera. Clicking on that little icon will bring up 2 options:

You can click “Take Photo” and jump right into the Camera app, or click “Choose Existing” and head into the Camera Roll and find the picture you want to send.

When you take the picture, you can optionally choose to Retake the photo, or click Use to have it go into your message.

You can type your text right in the speech bubble. I really like how the image is shrunk down and appears with the message. When you click send, it ends up in its own little speech bubble and the text gets separated into its own bubble:

You will notice a nice addition in 3.0 is that the screen isn’t locked with the sending progress bar anymore. The progress shows up at the top so you are free to start typing the next message, or go back and send a message in a different message thread.

I couldn’t make it happen, but when I first started using this feature I would have failed messages. I am with Rogers up here in Canada so shortly after 3.0 came out I imagine they were a bit overloaded with MMS going everywhere. When failures occur, 3.0 now shows them with a red exclamation point beside them. All you have to do is click that and hit the Retry button when it prompts. This is great because it leaves your messages there, so if it was network congestion with Rogers, I can easily leave the Messages app and come back in later and retry them.

You will notice as I did that with the image bubbles, you lose a lot of real estate in landscape mode trying to read other messages:

Of course if someone sends you a picture, it is easy to grab it. Just click on the image (it will appear as a bubble on the left, just like the senders messages) and you will get a full screen preview of the image. In the bottom left is a little icon that lets you easily save that image into your camera roll for safe keeping:

Speaking of camera roll, if you happen to be in there and looking at images and see something you want to share, there is a new option along with the Email to to send via MMS:

In the next part, I will share my experience with the tethering options found in 3.0.

Note: this article originally appeared on DavidRStorms.com on July 26, 2009 and is reprinted here unedited.