Wednesday, March 14, 2007

JasJam USB Modem

Today I visited the local Telstra shop where I bought my JasJam. I asked one of the sales guys there about expresscard laptop options and the answer was there are none. (Yet. I'm sure they will come). I showed him my phone (JasJam) and asked if there was a way to share the Next-G account with my phone and he told me I could use my mobile as a wireless modem. Dang, why didn't I think of that?

I know why... not being used to the new technology, I just assumed that hooking my mobile to my laptop would enable me to dial up as in the analog voice call kind of dial up. Wow, if this is true then maybe I don't need more hardware etc.

I found a pdf describing how on the clubimate.com web site, as well as on telstra.com (after some searching). The Telstra one is more specific to using it with Telstra. There are a few config settings which I made and I had to find some Vista drivers - the ones supplied on the cd are for XP and give an error when you try to install them. I found a thread here XDA USB Thread which has some drivers for Vista, including 64bit.

First attempt reported the modem was in use and could not dial. rebooted and tried again and this time it connected.

So it all worked after a bit of fiddling around, but now i've disabled it and won't be using it. Except in an emergency. Such as when i'm in a hotel and they want $30 a day to use the Internet. This is because the plan's available for mobile phones is SO expensive that text only browsing on a mobile is as much as you can afford. $29 plan would get me 70Mb of traffic before I get charged at 0.26c per K of traffic (both ways!). Bastards!

Oh, and Telstra has the most horrible tool for checking your data usage. It shows each individual session and does NOT tally them up. I mean come on! How hard is it to add up some numbers?? I called Telstra to ask them how much I had used for the month and SHE had to add them up too!! Someone needs to have a word with the developers there. I asked her to pass on my suggestion for a total. Not to mention it would make her job easier, she said she has to add them up all the time.

Next thing i'm planning on looking into is broadband for my new laptop. (The mobile option is too expensive). The new laptop should be here this time next week and if what I read is correct it has some form of inbuilt broadband wireless. (In addition to the wifi/802.11g) I might be able to use it with Vodaphone as the mention it on their web site. If I don't have to buy hardware, and just have to activate it then that may be a much cheaper option. Time to do some research, I can't be the first person to be doing this!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good News! Telstra now has higher wireless plans. upto $179 for 2Gb and 26cents for extra usage. Still expensive but better than any other wireless solution on the market. Also they now can send a sms at 91% and 100% of usage.

Anonymous said...

I have windows vista and an i-mate jasjam running on windows mobile 6.0. I want to use my laptop to connect to internet via the pocket pc connection. I have searched and searched the internet but in vain. Everywhere, they mentioned a program called modem link that i need to run first on the pocket pc, a program that doesn't exist on my jasjam.

I am going to try your vista drivers but please tell me if that will be enough and i am doing the right thing. Thanks

Lyynx said...

I was using the ROM for the DoPod because Telstra had not released the jasjam update. Perhaps the new version has a different program for sharing the internet connection? I'm not sure, I've not checked and these days am using an iPhone.
Sorry, that probably doesn't help you any.

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