Turning your Cell Phone into an Access Point

So i got an iPod Touch 32Gb the other day. I got sick of waiting for  a 64GB model.

I had the choice of iPhone which is 16GB (found the Cricket iPhone APN settings already) and nowhere near big enough, or iPod Touch which is big enough but has no GPS or Phone. Other than the wireless it has no way of accessing internet if im in the middle of nowhere. I figure i had a perfectly good phone (Nokia E65, all the features, but none of the size!).

So last night i was thinking, my cellphone has WIFI …. if i can turn my Cellphone into an ad-hoc access point then I can route the iPod Touch through it … so i promptly went hunting about on the net and stumbled across joiku.

So i grabbed the free version to test it, and low and behold it works brilliantly. Then i setup the iPod to use it and it fails … turns out it has a Proxy and needs to proxy things.

So I looked about online and found that to setup the proxy on the Ipod Touch I had to click on Settings -> Wifi -> Connection Name (the blue arrow) -> scroll down to proxy and make it ‘Auto’

Then in the box below this put in http://192.168.2.1/wpad.dat – for some reason it doesnt pick this up.

So i tried manual. That doesnt work either. So now im at the frustration point. I wasnt going to pay for the good version if I couldnt even get the light version. Why did i need a proxy in the first place? that seems a pretty silly way to go about doing things. After a couple of days messing about with this I decided there must be a better option, If there wasnt I would have to write my own.

I googled about for a better solution, and found http://walkinghotspot.com/

Paid the $25USD, it sent me a URL and emailed me a pin number to use so i could download it. I went to the URL (which was just http://walkinghotspot.com/s60 ) and i was able to download without using my reg code. Needless to say this frustrated me somewhat having paid for it and any old person could download it.

So i sat down and installed it on the phone, got a tad confused with the strange setup it has, but worked it out eventually. After many hours i kept getting “connection error #2 please check network settings”. So i kept going over and over every single setting i had for both phone and connections.

Another day of frustration goes by (ok i have a day job so i cant spare more than a couple hours on things like this). So at Lunch I gave the installer to husband (hey it didnt ask for a pin number yet!), and he installed it. He also has an E65 phone (yeah yeah we are both geeks), and fairly good technical knowledge.

He starts it up, and away it goes … and it connects!! … and then asks for registration code , which we didnt have at that time  (we were in the middle of the shopping area).

So i figured if it worked on his phone, and not mine, i must have some setting wrong. So i sat down this evening with both phones side by side going through every single setting. They were all identical. grrr! I was about to fully reset my phone at this point, but I had to go out and take my youngest son to the school dance.

The oldest was texting me asking for money so i text the bank seeing what my balence was (I still had to go shopping yet). Bugger, i got the ‘you have no credit’. I was on my way shopping anyway, so i grabbed more credit ….. and then of course it hit me! DUH! it didnt work because i had no friggen credit! im such a fool!

So i promptly went home,  and tried again, same error … I got this 2 more times, then moves the phone to a different angle and tried again … it promptly logged in!

I then registered with the key they gave me, and now my ipod Touch is able to access internet using the Cell Phone as an access point.

So my main issues would be that Joiku is garbage and makes you use some proxy, I need to make sure i put money on my phone (i get free calling to family, and dont really use it otherwise so i forget), and that I live in the edge of a small town with no decent coverage 🙂