Things that ought to exist if they don't already

[dsrtao]

If you have a laptop or a netbook, you might have a cell modem for it.

You can probably already hook that cyberman bluetooth headset to the device. Can you initiate a call that way?

How about a bluetooth handset that can talk to the computer, and has a keypad, a mike and a speaker? Now you can use the very expensive very heavy phone while it's in your bag.

Comments

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I generally do it the other way around: I use my cellphone as a Bluetooth modem.

[siderea]

The problem is that the way my laptop talks to my cell phone is via bluetooth. And that the way the phone talks to the borgset is via bluetooth. And than my phone can only talk to one bluetooth connection at a time. Phooie.

That said, I can initiate a call from either the borgset or the computer (or more commonly the Palm). If the former, I'm using voicerec and taking the call on the borgset; if the latter, I'm sending a number from my Palm to the phone and taking it from the phone itself.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Or acoustically couple the phone to the laptop (most have both speaker and microphone these days) and you've got a decent 2400 baud connection that might not even count as tethering...

Even better

[metageek.livejournal.com]

It might not count as Net access, either.

However, it'd be an interesting hack to see how much throughput you could get out of a coupler like that. The limiting factor would probably be the quality of the phone's speaker and microphone. The speaker can probably manage decent quality on any phone that can play music; but the microphone might not be capable of anything better than, well, cellphone quality voice.

A more amusing hack would be to use a video signal. If your laptop and your phone both have front-facing cameras, you can point them at each other and encode a bitstream into the video stream.