Tethering is cool, it saves you money, is easy to do and lets you get on the internet anywhere you get mobile phone has signal. Isn’t that cool? Tethering isn’t actually anything new, I “thethered” my nokia 8210 with my toshiba laptop back in 2001, the problem back then was firstly my laptop battery was really bad and only lasted an hour and Secondly my Nokia downloaded websites slower then it takes most web developers to put an entire website together. Thankfully things as moved on since then.

Now tablets are all the rage and laptops last a good few hours on their battery and don’t require a fork lift to carry them about. So how does it work? It might surprise you that all you need to tether is a phone with Bluetooth. So you don’t even need a smartphone to do it, although Smartphones do make it a whole lot easier to set up. You also need to have a data plan on your phone otherwise you might find yourself with a hefty bill at the end of the month. To be honest legacy phones aren’t especially easy to tether to so here we’re going to talk about Smartphones as you’ll most likely have a data plan with this anyway.

Android is the cheapest and easiest OS to tether with.  The way to tether does vary with manufacturer and version of the OS. For example the Samsung Galaxy S running Android 2.2 will only tether over a USB cable whilst the Samsung Galaxy S II can tether using wifi. There are plenty of guides out there for your specific phone but here’s an example of how it works with the HTC Incredible S. All you have to do is go to the settings menu, and open up the Wireless and networks menu. Once here all the user has to do is enter the Tethering and portable hotspot menu and configure the network. The user then chooses a name for their wifi hotspot and a password. Once saved the phone then starts to share it’s internet connection over wifi. Connect your laptop or tablet as you would to any other wifi point and you now have the ability to browse the web, get on Facebook send e-mail and what ever else you like to do on-line.

This is one of the easier ways of doing it you’ll need to check how your phone can support tethering but as long as it’s fairly modern you phone should be able to do it. The last point to bear in mind is that your network may not allow tethering with your data bundle for your phone. You’ll need to check but thankfully O2 has decided to include tethering in all of their tariffs from the 29th of March , so if you’ve taken a contract out since this date you can tether your day away. We’ve put together some tether deals here too that include a phone and internet device so you can get the most out of being on-line where ever you are.