On Wednesday, Suzy's fragile Motorola V60s phone from Verizon Wireless finally went totally crazy and started malfunctioning and displaying the Motorola logo upside down. We decided at that point it was time to ditch all manner of CDMA phones and bring her on to my T-Mobile service by converting her apartment landline to a number on my family plan.

We went to the T-Mobile store in the Columbia Mall in Columbia, MD on December 31, 2004 and spoke with Kayla Moss behind the counter. I asked her about converting the account over to a family plan and if we would be able to walk out of there with a Nokia 6800 on our hands for free. After a quick phone call she assured us that we could with a 1 year commitment and family plan.

We got the $49.99 plan that offers 400 minutes per month and tacked on a second unlimited mobile data plan, bringing the total to about $95/mo for two GSM phones with Internet anywhere we want. The cost in the store was just a $35 activation fee for the SIM card tacked onto my next phone bill.

The conversion of the number from a Verizon landline to a cell phone number could take anywhere from, as she put it, "two hours to ninety days" but in the meantime, T-Mobile gave Suzy a temporary cell phone number to use until the conversion was complete. At the end of the process she has a Catonsville, MD exchange in the 410 area code on her cell phone and Verizon gets another kick in the ass by the FTC, so we were happy to do it.

The Nokia 6800 isn't a Bluetooth capable phone, so on the way out we stopped by Radio Shack ("You've got questions, we've got blank stares!") in the mall and picked up the FutureDial Cable 22 without a connection software package for $22. We figured we'd figure it out once we got home and started to play around with it.

Out of the box, the Nokia 6800 is a fantastic phone. We plugged the cable into the bottom and the other side into her iBook G4. Nothing happened. A couple of web searches later we found out on the maccellphone Yahoo Group that the cable is basically a RS232 to USB converter with the RS232 end in a pin-out that can connect to the bottom of the phone.

The driver for the Centos, Inc. chipset to recognize the RS232 chipset can be found at this link.

When you download the package it opens up a PKG file on the Macintosh that requires root to install. After the installation and a reboot we went to Network under System Preferences where OS X announced that it had found a new device called usbserial and to click Apply to add it to the list.

Once the usbserial device was installed, it was a simple matter to click on it under the network menu and configure the PPP settings for T-Mobile as:

Service Provider: T-Mobile
Account Name: user
Password: pass
Telephone Number: *99#

Then under Edit Configurations, we set the modem as "Nokia Infrared" ("Nokia iR 6210 - 8xxx" also seems to work) to load in the proper initialization strings.

Once that was done, we went into the menu of the phone and selected Connectivity, then GPRS, then GPRS Modem Settings, Active Access Point and Edit active access point. Under GPRS access point we typed in:

internet3.voicestream.com

Then from the Internet Connect application, we selected the phone icon with usbserial underneath it, and clicked Connect. Ten seconds later the phone made a GPRS connection and we were online.

Simple as that. I highly recommend T-Mobile for any mobile professional who needs fast and reliable access to the Internet on either a Mac or PC for a very reasonable price.

Feel free to e-mail me if you are trying to do the same thing and have any questions.

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