One of the things I like my most about my T-Mobile G1 is that I can tether the mobile phone to my laptop and use my mobile phone’s Internet connection to browse the web. Tethering isn’t anything new, but most cell phone carriers simply won’t allow it. They want you to go buy their expensive AIR cards and then pay an additional $50 – $75 per month for service.
Graham Stewart, from Boulder, Colorado created a very nice little Android app to tether the G1 to a laptop (or any computer for that matter).
Here are the instructions to get everything set up:
To get on the Internet, you’ll need to do a few things.
1. Open a cmd prompt (Press the windows icon and type cmd in the search bar). You need to navigate to the directory that contains the adb.exe file. In my case, I just downloaded the ADB utility (see above) and not the entire Android SDK platform. I unzipped the ADB utility into a folder called “Android” on my C: drive. Now in the cmd prompt you’ll type cd C:Android
Now you need to type: adb forward tcp:1080 tcp:1080
If all goes well you should receive something that says “Daemon started successfully” (and then the window will appear to close). The program is still running in the background so whenever you’re done using the Internet you should close it. Press Ctrl+Shft+Esc to open the Task Manager. Under the Processes tab, close the file called adb.exe to exit the program.
Tip: I created a simple shortcut on my desktop (right click on your desktop and select New Shortcut) to skip having to open the cmd prompt and enter the forwarding command each time. If your adb.exe file is located in a different folder than mine below, just change the path to match yours. Here is what my shortcut looks like.
C:Androidadb.exe forward tcp:1080 tcp:1080
I also changed the icon of the shortcut to a cell phone because I’m cool like that.
2. Using Firefox is the best way to browse the web using this tethering app. You can use Internet Explorer but I’m not making a tutorial for installing the proxy program with IE. IE is scary.
Anyways, using Firefox, go to http://www.foxyproxy.com and download the plugin for Firefox. Firefox should install it and then restart. Once Firefox has restarted you should see something in the bottom right corner that says “FoxyProxy: Disabled.” Right click on that and select Options. Click on the Global Settings tab and then select “Use Socks Proxy for DNS Lookups”. It will make you restart Firefox again… do so.
Now left click on the “FoxyProxy: Disabled” in the bottom right corner once. Click on the tab that says Proxies. On the right, click on Add New Proxy. Make sure Enabled is checked and then give it a name. I named my connection “G1? but you can name yours whatever you’d like. Now click the tab at the top that says Proxy Details. Select Manual Proxy Configuration and enter the host name (which is localhost) and the port (which is 1080). Check the SOCKS proxy box and then choose Socks v5. Click OK at the bottom of the window.
You’re so freakin’ close now!
Now that you have TetherBot installed on your phone, you’ve added the adb utility to your laptop and you’ve configured FoxyProxy in Firefox you should be able to give this thing a whirl.
These are the steps you’ll need to take each time you launch TetherBot
The port bouncer will let you connect to a single port on a remote host. This works well if you need to establish an SSH tunnel to your home machine.
This should work for TCP only vpns (openvpn can be configured in this mode) but it wont work for Microsoft PPTP (because it’s GRE based) or most typical openvpn setups (because they are UDP based).
and you should be routed through to the server in question.
For more articles from Coldplatter, please visit