Anyone use phone as mobile hotspot?

[Joe the meek]

Getting ready to pull the plug on getting an iPad.

Looking at the plans, just thinking of getting one with wifi and pay $20 an extra month to use the phone as a mobile hotspot. This way, I can stop the plan/payment anytime I want.

Anyone use their phone as a mobile hotspot, and if yes, what do you like and dislike about it?

Any feedback would be appreciative.

Thanks

 

[NoDak]

Joe, I just got mine set up a week ago, so haven't had a lot of time to mess with it as my iPad hasn't left the house but once. I drove out of town a ways and set it up. Cruised my forums from my pickup with good speed and it worked great! I also set up in my shop, which is out of range of the WiFi in the house, and it worked fairly well. I will warn you, though, "hotspotting" uses up boo koo battery on the phone. Have your charger handy and you should be just fine.

 

[Joe the meek]

Joe, I just got mine set up a week ago, so haven't had a lot of time to mess with it as my iPad hasn't left the house but once. I drove out of town a ways and set it up. Cruised my forums from my pickup with good speed and it worked great! I also set up in my shop, which is out of range of the WiFi in the house, and it worked fairly well. I will warn you, though, "hotspotting" uses up boo koo battery on the phone. Have your charger handy and you should be just fine.

Thanks

I live with a couple of car chargers.

Don't need a real high speed connection, just so I can send some documents if needed while out on the road.

 

[Tim]

I would need to pay an extra $30 a month to enable hot spot and tethering. But there are ways around that with the right phones. With my current data plan I can root my phone and enable the hot spot...

Yes it uses up the battery faster but it's worth it when you need to use your tablet.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S2 phone and a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet. It's nice to have hot spot capability without paying extra

 

[Sneakiecat]

There's an app for Android, FoxFi, that allows you to use it as a hotspot without paying for anything. My parents have been using it with their tablets with no problems, pretty decent speed too. And super easy to set up.

 

[Siphorous]

When I'm posting at work, I use my iPhone as the ad-hoc hotspot provider for browsing. It's jailbroken (still on OS 4.x) and I use a relatively well known app for providing the hotspot. I don't download as I don't want to extract the urine as it were with the unlimited data plan I'm on.

As has been said - it does eat up the battery but that's not an issue as it's plugged in whilst at work.