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Palm Pre Does Not Get US Tethering Either

Posted by kdawson on from the cutting-the-cord dept.

fermion writes "The Register is reporting that Palm has sent a note to the Pre Dev Wiki asking it to stop discussing tethering. Palm is worried that its US carrier partner, Sprint, is none too eager to have users tether the game-changing tetherable smart phone. While the communication was informal, not legal, the development forum is evidently eager to avoid any possibility of lawsuits, so has rapidly agreed. Perhaps, like the iPhone, the Pre is going have a vigorous underground. What is interesting is that the Pre, like the iPhone (allegedly), can be tethered outside of the US; but even those customers are being denied apparently lawful information to satisfy the US exclusive agents."

3 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Dumb by m3rck · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sprint allows the these phones to tether:

    Blackberry 8703e, Blackberry 8130, Blackberry 8330, Blackberry 8830, 1HTC Touch, 1HTC Mogul (6800), 1HTC Apache (6700), LG Fusic LX-500, LG Muziq, Motorola KRZR, Motorola RAZR V3c, Motorola, RAZR2, Motorola Q, Motorola Q9c, Palm Centro, Palm 700w, Palm 755p, Samsung A900, Samsung A900M. Samsung A920, Samsung ACE, Samsung i830, Samsung SPH-m520,Sanyo SCP-8400. Sanyo Katana, Sanyo Katana 2, Sanyo M

    The Pre is nothing special, and Sprint has no idea what it is doning.

  2. we've known about this for awhile by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sprint removed it from their website back in February.

    Did you really think that an industry that charges 15 cents for 50 bytes of text (IM) that could easily be stuffed into the header overhead of routine handset-to-tower comms would give you tethering for free? really?

  3. Re:Ok...and? by ahoehn · · Score: 4, Informative

    Plus, the summary does a pretty awful job of getting to the real story. I've been following the development thread and chat since the rooting of the Pre was first announced. The motivation for the development forum's choice to stop talking about tethering wasn't eagerness to avoid lawsuits, it was appreciation for the way that Palm engineers have been interacting with the "underground" community.

    Palm engineers have been involved in the unofficial dev forum threads and chat, dropping hints, giving the "hackers" knowledge that might have otherwise taken weeks or months for them to discover unaided.

    The big stories here are:
    1) Palm DIDN'T send a cease and desist. They nicely said, "Hey, if you want us to keep helping you out here, stop talking about tethering."

    2) The Pre Dev community is doing some amazing things, thanks to the fact that the Pre is essentially a little Linux box with a nifty GUI.

    3) It doesn't really matter that the affected wiki and forum aren't discussing tethering, since solutions have already been released elsewhere.

    Want to get involved yourself? Head over to the most active dev thread at Precentral.net, contribute to the Wiki, or join the chat at #webos-internals on FreeNode (irc.freenode.net).

    --
    Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.