Not only can you access the internet using your SmartPhone but you can also use it to provide Internet access to your laptop. This is great when your laptop is not near a Wi-Fi, public LAN, or your only way to access the Internet is through a pay "hotspot", or even worse...dial-up.
The instructions I am going to give are for connecting your SmartPhone to your laptop using the USB data cable. You can also do this using BlueTooth, and it works equally well, but it is a little more complex to step through as the process requires getting your SmartPhone and Laptop handshaking on the Bluetooth connection. Specifically I am performing this using a Verizon Motorola Q9m, but most others should be similar. This exact process may only work on Windows Mobile 6.0 or 6.1 OS as well. It does not appear that WM5 devices have the needed executables. (At least in our limited testing.)
With your SmartPhone connected to your laptop, use ActiveSync to Explore Smartphone, go to the \Windows directory. Scroll down until you find a file named "InternetConnectionSharing". Right click on it and select "Copy". Now go to \Windows\Start Menu and again right clicking and select "Paste Shortcut". This will create a shortcut to IntShrUI.exe and it will be named something like "InternetConnectionSharing(2)". You can leave it like this, but I would rename the file and drop the number (2) from it (you can do this by right clicking on it and selecting "Rename").
You are now ready to use your SmartPhone as a modem for your laptop (or PC or desktop, etc.). Make sure that your laptop is connected to your SmartPhone using the USB data/sync cable. If your laptop is currently hooked up to a network (wireless, ethernet, dial-up, etc) disable the network card for this test. Once you are sure you are no longer connected to the Internet, go to "Start/Internet Sharing" on your SmartPhone (directly on the phone not using ActiveSync) and click on the icon.
The application will start on your phone and you will have to click on the left hand soft key named "Connect" (the options should be already filled in for you, but if not, they should be "PC Connection = USB" (or "Bluetooth PAN" for Bluetooth-Paired phones) and "Network Connection = Broadband Access"). That's it, you should now be able to surf on the Internet from your laptop. When you are done, bring up the Internet Sharing application and click on "Disconnect". Don't forget to re-enable your network card if you previously disabled it for this test.
So now when you are out in the real world and have no Internet connectivity on your laptop, you now can use your SmartPhone to keep you connected. I highly recommend you go the next step and get it working Bluetooth, because those USB sync cables just never seem to be around when you need one!
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