Networking With Your iPhone

Did you know that you can use your iPhone to wirelessly connect your PCs/laptops to the internet or to each other?


Well you can.

Go to 'Settings' and look for 'Personal Hotspot'. Tap it, and this screen will appear:

Tap 'Personal Hotspot' to turn it on.

Now Go to your laptop and look for available wireless networks. Your phone should show up as one, so click on it and join it. You will be prompted to enter a password. That's on you iPhone screen just below the 'Personal Hotspot' entry. The phone generates one for you, but you can tap on the field and create your own if you like.

And that's it. You can connect more than one machine to the phone, so if they have shared folders you can access them. And all of the machines can make use of the phone's wireless internet connection.

A warning, though - when you view websites on the phone they are often optimised for use on a phone, and use up less bandwidth than they would on a conventional computer. Obviously this will not be the case when you are viewing them on a computer connected to your phone. In addition watch out for the automatic download of updates to your computer(s). Both of these could seriously eat into your phones bandwidth allowance.

However in an emergency it gives you a useful way to network computers and access the internet.

(Here in the office we tried to add our printer to the network as well, but the phone rejected it. If we manage to work out how to do it we'll let you know.)