I'm one of the people that gets royally screwed by Verizon's setup with regard to using one of their phones as a hotspot.
For my situation I have a rooted original Droid and had been using WiFi Tether here and there. I used it once this past year at a business event for two days for a total of 10 hours when the facility couldn't get their WiFi working. I then also used it a few times at airports (for a grand total of my 5 hours) where WiFi wasn't free.
For someone like me there's simply no way I can justify spending $20 more a month.
I had been hoping either Verizon would wake up and make some changes for people like me who aren't going to abuse the feature or that they'd look the other way for when it happens. I had planned to use it a bit more with my next phone as I had been thinking about an eBook reader and a tablet (both WiFi-only) and, again, neither would get a lot of hotspot use from the phone as both would mainly use my own router-based WiFi at home or WiFi in other locations.
Then a story about the upcoming Bionic got me curious. The Bionic, like the Atrix, has its own "laptop-like" accessory to let you use the phone and the accessory as a laptop replacement and there's no additional fee.
That's pretty much what I'd be interested in and I'm wondering what the difference is. Sure, in one case the phone is physically connected but I'd be more than glad to do that with my laptop, my eBook reader or tablet (not even sure you can connect them that way). I'm not concerned about sharing the connection with multiple devices at once.
How can Verizon identify that the device is the accessory versus my accessing the web via my laptop or some other device? Is it simply the WiFi hotspot piece that's the issue here and if I'm willing to cable then I don't have to worry about it?
Bottom line to me is I'd be willing to give them maybe another $5 a month for hotspot with limited data and see how that goes but no way am I paying them 67% of the main data cost for something I'd barely even use.
For my situation I have a rooted original Droid and had been using WiFi Tether here and there. I used it once this past year at a business event for two days for a total of 10 hours when the facility couldn't get their WiFi working. I then also used it a few times at airports (for a grand total of my 5 hours) where WiFi wasn't free.
For someone like me there's simply no way I can justify spending $20 more a month.
I had been hoping either Verizon would wake up and make some changes for people like me who aren't going to abuse the feature or that they'd look the other way for when it happens. I had planned to use it a bit more with my next phone as I had been thinking about an eBook reader and a tablet (both WiFi-only) and, again, neither would get a lot of hotspot use from the phone as both would mainly use my own router-based WiFi at home or WiFi in other locations.
Then a story about the upcoming Bionic got me curious. The Bionic, like the Atrix, has its own "laptop-like" accessory to let you use the phone and the accessory as a laptop replacement and there's no additional fee.
That's pretty much what I'd be interested in and I'm wondering what the difference is. Sure, in one case the phone is physically connected but I'd be more than glad to do that with my laptop, my eBook reader or tablet (not even sure you can connect them that way). I'm not concerned about sharing the connection with multiple devices at once.
How can Verizon identify that the device is the accessory versus my accessing the web via my laptop or some other device? Is it simply the WiFi hotspot piece that's the issue here and if I'm willing to cable then I don't have to worry about it?
Bottom line to me is I'd be willing to give them maybe another $5 a month for hotspot with limited data and see how that goes but no way am I paying them 67% of the main data cost for something I'd barely even use.
