I know I can tether my iPhone without paying O2's obscene prices, however, I'm not sure on the legality of it all.

I only want to download my emails, which I can do on my phone anyhow, so I won't be using any more data than I do at present, but I want to be able to view them on my laptop as they often contain Excel spreadsheets and suchlike.

what can I do? would using a VPN stop O2 from knowing about a few sneeky downloads here and there? should I care? if the worse they're going to do is make me spend my hard earned cash with another service provider, then I'm not worried, if they're going to land me with a huge bill, then I probably am a little bit.

I think my problem is I'm stupidly honest and don't like to be too naughty.

IT boffins to the rescue please.

Sorry, I don't think we know how exactly they are identifying non-iPhone traffic yet. I suspect you won't draw attention if you keep your usage pretty moderate.

As a legal alternative, use your iPhone to Remote Desktop or VNC to your desktop PC (which is presumably connected via your broadband).
That wayyou can use all the progs on the PC from your phone.

How do I do that then?

If I get this job permanently after my secondment, I'll get a laptop with a 3g connection built in, so any temporary fix is appreciated.

You can get VNC or Remote Desktop Apps for free from App Store.

Remote Desktop is probably easiest if you have a windows pc as it is built-in.
Plenty of instructions on the web for how to activate it on the PC.

Then you start the app on your iPhone, tell it the IP address to connect to, enter your password and you'll have your PC screen in front of you. Just like that annoying gotomypc advert, but without the pigeons and extravegant costs.

I got tethering to work from my 3GS yesterday by downloading a config profile file from internet, worked flawlessly, and £15 a month saved or so 🙂

i've beed tethering my O2 XDA to my netbook at work for the last 6 months.
i have the web bolt on so 'unlimited' traffic.
got my first text message from them asking my to limit my usage last month when I'd just hit 2gb so as long as you don't go mental I doubt you'd have any bother.

Have a look at logmein as they do an iphone app to work with the remote desktop

Ive used my O2 XDA as a bluetooth modem (over activesync) for over a year, never a problem, but I dont stream media.

The logmein iphone app is a small fortune though.

Download the config file and tether away Paul, there is no way of identifying data that is being forwarded to the laptop. A mate has had tethering enabled for the last couple of months as he downloaded os 3.0 as a developer and O2 were non the wiser that he had been tethering for all this time. People are also challenging the legality of charging extra for data for tethered iphones as other phones on the same network can tether as part of their data package. Essentially we are being penalised for being iPhone users.

If all that fails I can e-mail you an app that was available for a couple of weeks that allowed tethering before apple pulled it from the store. I used it for four days last time I was on holiday in London and nobody got too upset….

I'll tell you all about it tomorrow if you like Paul.

Cheers all!

http://help.benm.at/help.php easy.

Thats the way I would have done it, should I already have tethered my iphone and found that it worked stupidly easily 🙂