T-Mobile Dash experiment

I have two cell phones. One of this is my iPhone, made by Apple and running Apple's version of FreeBSD. The other is the T-Mobile Dash. I usually use my iPhone, but this weekend I was using the Dash to see how well it worked. It was no better or worse than the iPhone in the one area that I'd hoped it would be better at: call quality.

In the process of trying it out, I discovered the uipaq driver in FreeBSD. I wanted to use the Dash as a tethered phone. It is the whole reason I got it. Since the iPhone doesn't officially support tethering, I thought I'd give the Dash a try.

The uipaq driver was added to FreeBSD 7.0, ported from NetBSD which ported it from OpenBSD. Its roots go way back to the old Compaq iPaqs that were made years ago. This same basic interface has gone through only minor evolution in the interceding years. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it work with my phone due to some minor issues else where.

In the process of trying, I discovered there was no man page, so I snagged one from NetBSD and hacked it to account for the differences with FreeBSD. In searching how to setup the phone as a ppp link, I stumbled into a PR that greatly expanded the number of devices the driver recognizes and made it committable, I discovered that it wasn't built as a module, and I discovered that an old PDA I had in the garage would work with this driver, in addition to my HCT dash. All the easy problems I fixed...

So I moved the rock up the hill a little. I'll try another day to see if I can track down the issues that were else where in the kernel and see if I can punch entirely through to the other side. The lack of a tether solution has been the biggest disappointment with the iphone that I've had. While a number of interesting hackers are possible in that area, none of them are as easy and as simple as my old Sprint Samsung SPC-7600 was. The Dash also has bluetooth, which I'll give a spin after I can get it to connect with the wires...

None of this would be necessary if Apple didn't have such a tight control on what one can and cannot put on the phone. Well, control isn't the real issue. Rather, the issue is that they choose to control it in a way I don't like. If they controlled it in every way the same way I wanted to configure it, I doubt very many people would care... Since they don't, a lot of people are very interested in hacking it... but that's starting to get off topic...