One of the things I love about my Windows Mobile device, a Blackjack II running on the AT&T network, is being able to tether it to my laptop to get an internet connection when I’m in a pinch and can’t find a Wi-Fi signal.
Windows Mobile 6.0 + a BJII used to require a non-trivial hack to get Internet Connection Sharing working - the largest part of which was actually installing ICS on the device.
However, WM 6.1 includes ICS by default*, so I was hoping ICS would just work.
But its not that easy
Unfortunately, ICS doesn’t work right out of the box. Every time I tried to connect, I received an error message
The remote party has ended this connection.
I’d seen this before and it was usually a problem with the GPRS connection settings. I thought, “No biggie… I’ll just fix the settings!”
- Settings | Connections | GPRS
Except when I got there, I couldn’t edit any of the settings. There were all locked down!
To the registry!
Using a mobile registry editor, I was able to change the values of a few keys, unlocking the settings and hopefully allowing me to use ICS.
- Find the key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Comm\ConnMgr\Providers
- Under one of the GUIDs you'll find a
Connections folder that will have an entry for each of your connections
- Under each connection, find the
ReadOnly key and set its value to 0 (zero).
I then navigated back to the GPRS connection settings and confirmed that the settings were no longer locked – the little lock icons disappeared.
Next, I had to edit my AT&T ISP connection, changing the Access point to wap.cingular.
Welcome to the tubes
And finally, after all that hacking around, I was able establish an ICS connection between my phone and my laptop. I then made a quick post to Twitter, via my desktop client, just to make sure I was able to access the intar-tubes. :)
Hope this helps!