RAZR as a wireless-anywhere modem

Since it's hard to say who your carrier is, it's hard to really say for sure... but unless it's T-Mobile what you're doing is called 'tethering' and will get you in a world of hurt unless you have the PDA access plan.

That aside...

With BT, you will get a faster transfer speed for files and the like to and from the phone. You will absolutely not get any faster internet access, because the RAZR is a GPRS phone, and doesn't have EDGE (high speed) capabilities. So going with a BT adapter is only going to save you the hassle of a wire.

 

I'd look at any BT 1.2 or 2.0 adapter. You can pick one up off ebay for under 10 dollars in most cases. Since they all use virtually the same chipset, it's usually just a case of googling the model number and checking on the chipset if you really want to get down and dirty with it.

Keep in mind there are 2 types of 'unlimited' access plans. There's one that's for the phone, and there's a corporate data plan, which is what lets you tether. The carriers do notice when you push a lot of data across, and they can tell what you're doing by what ports your opening and the like. I've read tales of people getting whacked with... really high charges (over 1000/mo) when they've gotten caught tethering.

There are some phones that can legitimately do a lot of computer type activity on the unlimited phone plan. I tend to believe that unless you purpose bought a corporate data plan, the RAZR would have been sold with the phone access plan. Some phones, such as the Nokia 6682/6620 can do P2P file sharing, full web browsing, streaming audio and video, and it's perfectly legit because the client software actually runs on the phone. But the RAZR is pretty limited in what it can do from the phone itself.

 

I have "enabled" all the bluetooth functions within my Motorola E815. It will allow me to use it for dialup networking, file transfers, and OBEX. The dialup is not even a hack. All I had to do was punch in ##DIALUP and DUN was enabled. This works either tethered by the USB cable or by bluetooth. The connection type it uses, on the Verizon network, is 1xRTT speed. The last time I did a bandwidth check through the bluetooth, I was getting 440kbps download, 112kbps upload.

I can even VPN through the phone to my office (Verizon) and do almost anything I need. If you have a notebook computer with built-in bluetooth, it works almost seemless. The best bluetooth devices to use with a phone use the Widcomm driver. Do you research to see if your BT in your computer uses such software.

My work HP nc6230 has the BT built-in, while I use a TrendNET USB BT dongle for my personal computer.

 

John... I printed out your instructions for connecting the RAZR to the Prius. It worked like a charm. As to your question, the RAZR works fine as a modem via BT. I just purchased a Sony Vaio TX series laptop and it works flawlessly. I have Cingular, so the connection is decent for light browsing and email. It is SO COOL, to have the phone in your pocket and not have to deal with connecting it. I will try the USB connection as I did not realize that it provides for charging.

 

I'm curious to know if you have a pc or a mac notebook and which carrier that you are using for your RAZR. My RAZR under Cingular does not charge via a usb port on the pc unless you install "Motorola Phone Tools" which contains a driver for the phone. On the mac usb it charges without a problem. I couldn't figure out why Motorola or Cingular would do that other than to force you to buy the software. I now wonder if they have changed that design.

 

One other thing to keep in mind when tethering, the phone itself matters a lot.

Since the RAZR is only a GPRS (Class 10), the theoretical maximum data speed you can get is around 6K a second. In reality, you'll likely get 3-5K, tops. For obvious reasons this isn't going to be that great for battery life if you do a lot of surfing (radio on more = battery drains down faster).

If you use a EDGE phone, you theoretcially could get over 20K a second (depending on the implementation), but a more realistic rate would be around 14-16K/sec depending on the phone and EDGE class.