Enable Free Hotspot Tethering from Your iPhone Without Jailbreak [Tip]
Many people think the only way to hack an iPhone is to install a jailbreak. But little do they know, they can modify things without jailbreaking; for example, hotspot tethering. If you are not familiar with tethering, it’s basically when you take the data/internet on your mobile and use it to give your computer internet access. Now before, this could only be done through jailbreaking your device. But now, iTweakiOS have claimed they have a simple and free method to do personal hotspot tethering on your iPhone.
Phone carriers have provided tethering before, but not free of charge. They charge a fee to activate the tethering option so that you can use your iPhone’s cellular data to connect other devices. In order to avail this service from iTweakiOSm your iPhone or iPad needs to be GSM and be running on iOS 6, or later. Just in case, make sure your device is backed up if you want to try out the hack. If anything goes wrong, your data will be available for recovery. T-Mobile is one carrier on which the hack has been confirmed to work. Do keep in mind that tethering your iPhone to a computer or laptop can eat up a lot of data. If your cellular data is limited, try not to use too much. But if you’re cellular data is unlimited, then tether away!
Tethering is fun and sometimes useful feature that can come in handy at times. For example if you are on a road trip, or vacation, and you took your laptop with you. Obviously your Wi-Fi will not travel along, so tethering internet from your phone is the best option. Carriers charge extra money, and phone bills are already hectic, so this free alternative is great. Go to iTweakiOS’s official guide to see complete instructions.
There are no perfect tethering options for iPhone. All come with some sort of drawback. That said, among your limited options we feel the best is PDANet for it's simple configuration, versatility, and its ability to hide the fact that you're tethering from your carrier.
Platform: iPhone (Jailbroken)
Price: Free / $16 or $29
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PDANet is very simple and easy to use. You just turn on the type of tethering you want, connect on your computer, and you're all set. You can add WEP encryption to your Wi-Fi connection if you want some added security. Most importantly, you can hide your tethering activity from your carrier. This is huge if you're trying to get out of paying their ridiculously high tethering fees.
PDANet has a few downsides, but you might not care about any of them. First of all, you need to jailbreak your iPhone in order to download PDANet. Not all users are going to want to jailbreak, but until Apple decides to approve tethering apps (which will likely never happen) your only other option is paying your carrier.
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What is probably the biggest downside to PDANet is that it requires a desktop client if you're using USB mode. PDANet also has a high price tage. Currently it is being sold for $16, but normally it will cost you $29. MyWi, which you'll find in the competition section, is $20 (so usually cheaper—just not at the moment). It doesn't provide the potentially necessary option of hiding the fact that you're tethering from your carrier, but depending on how much you tether that shouldn't matter. Of course you can still use PDANet without paying if you don't visit any secure web sites, but that likely prohibits you from accessing most of what you'll want to access.
Finally, you can only encrypt your connection with WEP. As we've noted before, cracking a WEP password isn't too difficult. If you want WPA you're out of luck. It is only a temporary network, of course, so it's not like you're necessarily going to need the added protection if the network is only up for an hour or so.
MyWi ($20) also requires a jailbreak, but costs a bit less and offers a little more customizability. It's a really great app for tethering, and if it weren't for PDANet's ability to hide tethering activity from your carrier it's what we'd be recommending instead. If you want to learn more, read this.
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Can be used as a wired speaker 10.
Your carrier (around $20/month) generally offers a tethering plan of some kind. The problem is you're often paying almost twice as much to use the same data. While this is more understandable with unlimited plans, carriers still charge you this much with limited data plans as well. We think this sucks and is far too expensive to be worthwhile. If you don't want to/can't jailbreak and have money to burn, however, it's definitely the easiest option for tethering.
Lifehacker's App Directory is a new and growing directory of recommendations for the best applications and tools in a number of given categories.
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