Inclind purchased iPhone 3Gs phones for each employee last week, launching us into the future of handheld cellular devices. I was a little sour on the phone in the past, mainly due to cost, locked-in carrier agreement and proprietary platform. Now, with the AppStore and 3.0 Firmware, the iPhone is a solid contender in the mobile market with over 30 million units sold.Hopefully I will be writing regularly about the iPhone. I spend a lot of time with the device and testing out Apps.

The new 3.0 Firmware introduced a lot of new features that the community has been demanding since the iPhone first went on sale.

You can see most of the new features here:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/softwareupdate/

The one thing that stuck out to me as ‘missing’ when I was looking through the phone was the Tethering functionality. Tethering lets you use an external device such as a MacBook to use your phones data connection to access the internet. Previously, that page did not say AT&T was not supporting tethering, and you cannot find this option anywhere on the iPhone right now. Of course, with a jailbroken iPhone, you can access anything. That voids warranty though, so we don’t want to do that. But, there is a way to enable iPhone Tethering without jailbreaking the phone!

**Disclaimer: It is against AT&T TOS to use data tethering, so use at your own risk!**

On a Mac:

First, you need to have iTunes 8.2, an iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS, and 10.5.x Leopard Operating System for iPhone Tethering to work.

1. Download the AT&T carrier settings file (thanks Gizmodo)
2. Connect your iPhone to your Mac via dock or USB cable
3. Copy the following text: defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
4. Open the Terminal app, and paste the text you just copied in Step 3
5. Sync your iPhone in iTunes, when it says Ok to Disconnect, hold the Option key and click Restore in iTunes
6. It will ask what file to restore. Select the ATT_US.ipcc file you downloaded in Step 1 and click Restore

Now you can go into your Settings on the iPhone and see that Internet Tethering is a new option!

If you are using Windows, the steps are slightly different. You can view the steps over at krillr.com.

Be careful! AT&T does not want people using iPhone Internet Tethering right now because they do not have a data plan for that, so if you go online don’t transfer a lot of data and garner attention.

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