Use Down Time While Out and About to Catch Up and Send Email

Anne P. Mitchell, Esq.

[Part 2 of a 2-part article about how to connect your Mac laptop through your bluetooth-enabled phone so that you can catch up on your email during downtime while waiting for a meeting or an appointment, on the train, or sitting at the coffee shop.]

[Continued from Part 1]

If you haven't yet paired your bluetooth cellphone with your computer, now is the time to do so. First, make sure to set your phone to "discoverable". Then, go into system preferences, and to the bluetooth pane. Check "support non-conforming phones", and turn bluetooth on if it isn't already. Then run "Bluetooth Setup Assistant", and follow it through to the end, adding your cellphone as a paired device. If your cellphone is already paired, and after you go through the set-up steps you can't connect your computer to the Internet with your phone, try unpairing and re-pairing your phone using these directions.

Next, go back to System Preferences, and go to the Network pane. Select "Bluetooth" from the "Show" drop-down menu.

Click on "TCP/IP" and make sure that the "Configure IPv4" drop-down is set to "Using PPP".

Now click over to the "PPP" tab, and fill in the "Service Provider" blank with the name of your service provider. Some of this information may already be filled in for you from when you did the Bluetooth Setup Assistant.

Then add in the account name, password, and telephone number required by your provider. The "username" which you got from Ross' site goes in the "Account Name" field, and the "password" goes in the "Password" field.

For telephone numbers try the following:

For Cingular/AT&T; it will usually be either *99***2# or *99# (try both).
For Verizon, try #777
For T-Mobile, I'm told that the same settings at for Cingular will work.

If these phone numbers don't work, try doing a Google search for "(name/model of your cellphone) bluetooth modem settings" and you should turn up plenty of leads.

In my case, with my provider being Cingular, my settings look like this:

Service Provider: Cingular Wireless
Account Name: [email protected]
Password: CINGULAR1
Telephone Number: *99#

(When I used my t616, the telephone number *99***2# worked.)

Now, while you are there, take a look at the options under "PPP Options". You will probably want to leave the advanced options alone, although some recommend unchecking "Send PPP echo packets" and "Use TCP header compression". Play with it if you like.

But under Session Options, which is the top half of that window, I like to check "Connect automatically when needed". What this does is it causes your computer to automatically reconnect if you lose the signal while connected through your cellphone.

However, what it also does is it tries to connect you through your phone automatically whenever you open your laptop. I personally find this less of a hassle and worth not having to manually reconnect if my connection gets dropped during a session.

Finally, go to the "Bluetooth Modem" section, and select whichever modem seems closest to your phone. When I was using my Sony Ericsson t616, it was the Ericsson Infrared modem script, despite the fact that I was actually using bluetooth. And in fact for my new Nokia 6620, I use the Nokia Infrared script. If you get no results from any of them, check out Barkman's Modem Scripts page and see what he has for you. But I've never had a problem with the phones I've tried and the modem scripts provided by Apple.

Also uncheck "Enable error correction and compression in modem", and "Wait for dial tone before dialing".

One last thing which you may want to do is to go to the "Show" drop-down, and select "Network Port Configurations". This is where you tell your computer which Internet access method to try first, second, and third, and so on. I have mine set to try my Airport first, then my bluetooth connection.

That's it! You're all done with the set up - be sure to check "Apply now" before closing system preferences!

Now, it could well be that at this point your set-up will just work (as things Mac so often do), so go ahead and try it. It could also be that you will need to add a few settings on your phone. In the case of my t616, I had to add the same settings from the PPP preferences pane (username, password, etc.) into the data connection information on my phone. With my Nokia, it just worked without my putting anything in the phone.

Once you have this up and working, just carry your laptop with you (you do that already, don't you?) and you'll be ready to take advantage of that long wait at the car wash to whittle down your email queue.