Tethering Your Android Phone

I love my Evo 4G. One of the most useful features of the phone in my opinion is the ability to tether other device’s to the Evo’s data connection through it’s Wi-Fi card. But Sprint wants to charge you $30.00 a month for this feature. Being a cheapskate I’m going to show you how to save money by getting Wi-Fi tethering working on your phone for free.

Enter androind-wifi-tether a free application that allows you to tether your laptop to the Evo’s data connection. This means anywhere you have data connectivity on your Evo you have Internet access on your laptop. The newest version of android-wifi-tether now supports WPA-PSK2 encryption which fixes my main criticism with the previous versions I’ve seen. Now I feel that android-wifi-tether is ready for the big leagues.

In order to use android-wifi-tether you must root your phone. Enter Unrevoked 3. Unrevked 3 is an application that runs on your computer (be it Windows, Linux, or Mac) and roots you phone. It also flashes a custom recovery partition to it. What’s a custom recovery partition? If you don’t know don’t worry about it, you don’t need to know what it is.

Before you start here is a big warning. Using Unrevoked 3 will almost certainly void the warranty on your phone.

Anyways Unrevoked 3 is going to be pretty straight forward and will tell you exactly what steps you need to take to root your phone. Once that’s done I advise using nandroid (you’ll see it when the phone boots) to backup everything on your phone (another advantage to rooting) to your SD card.

Once you’ve done that navigate your Evo’s browser to the android-wifi-tether download page and grab the latest version that will work with your phone (the phones each version works with is listed next to the download link). Once the file is downloaded install the .apk file and you now have an application called wireless tether. Run that application to turn on Wi-Fi tethering. The options to set the SSID and WPA key are in the menu under the settings section.

Congratulations you now have free Wi-Fi tethering!