Wireless Tether (Mobile Hotspot)

Maybe you thought that you needed an Evo 4G or a Droid X or some other "new" smart phone to do things like wireless tether (mobile hotspot). Well you don't. Your HTC Hero for Sprint supports wireless tether... you just need to root it first.

To root your HTC Hero for Sprint, read my "rooting" posts. They are all in the August 2010 archive on the right side of this page.

Once you have root privileges on your phone, you can run apps that "normal" Hero users cannot. One such app is Wireless Tether for Root Users by Müller, Lemons and Buxton. Just go to the Android app market with your rooted HTC Hero, download and install this gem and...


...vwala!

This app works great. While I haven't spent enough time using it to tell you how hard it is on your battery (without a doubt, it's hard on it), I can tell you that the connection speeds are zippy enough for casual web browsing and the tether is pretty "tight" (i.e. not a lot of packet loss). This app would be great for doing some work on the train or the passenger seat of a car. Best of all, this is a FREE mobile hotspot / wireless tether app. There are not additional fees associated with using this!

UPDATE (9/21/2010): I just found out that Sprint actually charges users an additional monthly fee to access mobile hotspot on supported phones! This wireless thether app for mobile hotspot is free and there are no fees. The joys of root.

In future posts, I will explore a wide variety of root user apps as well as custom ROMs.