How to use your phone as a wireless modem, speed up your wireless web connection, make your own screen savers, and more
The Sprint Mobile Phone Guide contains information on how to use your phone as a wireless modem for your PC, how to speed up your wireless web connection, and how to make your own FREE screensavers. Plus learn how to find all the great mobile-friendly websites out there using our MobileWeb site index!
Sprint PCS Phones & Smartphones
Being a Palm-related site, of course we need to recommend the Palm Powered smartphones. Since this is a Sprint Phone page, here are your options:
Using Your Phone as a Wireless PC Modem
There is a simple and free way to use your phone as a wireless modem for your laptop or PC. This method, however, is not only unsupported by Sprint but could also get you in trouble if you use it too much. We are not condoning the use of this method, but simply documenting how it might be done. Experts also warn that you should limit your data transfer to about 100 MB of data or less per month.
First, you need some
free software drivers from FutureDial. You do NOT need to buy their dialer software or any other software. They have USB drivers for most cell phones out there available for free download.
Once you install the phone drivers, then simply create a new Dialup Network Connection in Windows and key in your Sprint PCS userID and password and #777 for the phone number. That's it! You should be able to "dial out" using Sprint's highspeed CDMA 1xRTT network.
Sprint phone are configured to limit the speed of the connection and your throughput will be even less than this limit. Actually throughput is roughly equal to a good dial-up connection, but varies based on Sprint network traffic.
Create your own FREE Screensavers
Why does anyone pay a single cent for a screensaver for their phone. Who knows... its ridiculous. Those screensavers are just jpg images, but Sprint makes it almost impossible to figure out how to create your own. Fortunately,
SprintUsers.com offers a free web-based image converter that will accept any of your photos and send it to your Sprint PCS phone. This tool is called the
Focus Uploader. It will even resize the images to match your exact phone, but I recommend resizing them yourself ahead of time so you don't distort the proportions.
Before we found this tool, we created a few free screensavers in our
Sprint PCS Screensavers section, but we're using the Focus Uploader exlusively now and those go directly to your phone. If people are interested in posting their favorites here, feel free to
recommend a link to them.
Speeding Up Your Sprint Web Connection
If you happen to have a Sprint PCS Sanyo 5500/VM4500 phone like I do, here are instructions for increasing the phones maximum speed for the wireless web connection. The phone is preset to 144 kbps, which is less than the theoretical maximum on Sprint's CDMA 1xRTT network.
Dial ##040793 on your phone and hit the OK key. A hidden menu will come up that will let you select either 144 kbps (the default) or 230 kbps.
Don't expect to get a significant speed increase out of this as actual throughput is never anywhere near the maximum. However, why limit yourself on purpose to less?
Tell your friends. Oh wait, maybe you don't want to because if everyone does this you won't have an advantage anymore. :-)
PalmZone.net MobileWeb Site Index
PalmZone.net offers
MobileWeb, which is a
comprehensive portal for PDA-friendly sites. It includes news, sports, weather, business directory and maps, shopping, PDA news sites, and more!
