Extenuating Circumstances is a weblog by Dan Hon

Nokia E61, T-Mobile UK, 3G and Mac OS X Bluetooth Howto

How’s that for search engine keywords?

Here’s a howto for the Internet Connect settings for using a Nokia E61 as a 3G Bluetooth modem on T-Mobile UK’s Web’n'Walk 3G unlimited data tariff on Mac OS X 10.4. This should work for any other Nokia 3G phone on T-Mobile’s UK network.

• Use “*99***1#” as the Telephone Number.
• Use “user” as the Account Name
• Use “one2one” as the Password (the more astute among you will note here that this speaks volumes about the state of T-Mobile’s network infrastructure)
• For the Modem, use the supplied system Nokia Infrared script

That’s it. You should be set, modulo any OS X Bluetooth flakiness. Which, let’s be honest, has a non-zero chance of occurring.

Beautiful. We use these for work, and I had been using a slightly more tiresome script and method - this is far simpler!

The rather odd thing about the iPhone is tha it sounds like it can’t/won’t be able to act in this modem or “tethered” mode, which is a real shame. May be something to do with AT&T being cagey with data usage, but… a shame if true. Let’s hope the eventual UK carrier will be a bit more generous.

It’s surprisingly easy - once you know how!

Hopefully Apple will release a software update that will have marginally more useful Bluetooth functionality - and it now doesn’t look like we’ll be getting a 3G iPhone in the UK given Jobs’ comments about data transfer speed versus battery life.

Dan, that worked perfectly for me with a Nokia 6280. Really useful, thank you very much!