before a camera phone became my primary object of cellular lust i desired the sanyo 4900. the biggest reason for my desire was the fact that i could buy a cable and turn the phone into a modem. of course, at the time sprint was slinging the cables for somewhere in the ballpark of $80. that along with the fact that the phone was going for over $200 at the time made me put off my plans to run around all crazy go nuts with a cell connection to the web.
that is until now.
about three weeks ago i came into posession of the 4900 to go along with a long term webmonkey gig cleaning up code and taking point on a handful of designs for an unnamed company. sprint doesn't carry the cables anymore but i found a dutch auction on ebay selling just cables for $15 with shipping. after getting the cable monday i happened to grab the drivers for xp from sanyo, and adapted the instructions for using the 4900 with mac os x. it's really as simple as adding a new connection, leaving the username and password fields blank and setting the phone number as "#777" [which if you use your keypad for text messaging you know that corresponds to "#ppp"] and dialing. you might need to do some tweaking with your compression settings, port speed and add a set of dns servers to the tcp/ip settings for your phone but i'm getting a connection that's just slightly better than 56k in my office. thanks to the "unlimited sprint vision" plan i can connect anywhere i go. i need to do some more road testing but i'll be sure to post any results i get as i get them.
of course one could ask why i'd want to use sprint for mediocre dial-up like speeds when free wi-fi is readily available... while free wi-fi is really nice and ofter really fast i'd rather suffer with the lower speeds than worry about who is sniffing my traffic on an open access point when i need to check my mail or log in somewhere that doesn't support https, ssh or sftp. *shrug* that's just me tho.