George's Weblog

I struggled with this a bit so I thought I would share what I found that worked for me.

First of all, I did buy PDANet. I probably didn't have to since they only block HTTPS in the free version but they had a deal for only $18.95 which is pretty cheap. So I'm supporting the developers. Here is the URL for setting up the connection according to the PDANet folks. I followed some of these instructions but had to improvise.

I installed the PDANet application on my Droid. No big deal, just download it and load. You don't have to pay for the application on the phone, only for the host software. Everything went fine with the install. I heard that people had trouble when they turned on the PDANet application before enabling Bluetooth. I had Bluetooth already running so I'm not sure if this can present a problem or not. I also enabled USB debugging but I think that's only for USB tethering.

On the Mac, I downloaded and installed the latest version, it is 2.41. You have to reboot after you load it which I did. After rebooting, there is an icon in the top bar which shows whether the phone is connected. It seems that it retains the little red X when you have it tethered via Bluetooth. I'm guessing that is an indicator for when you have the phone tethered via USB. I already had the phone paired with the MBP.

It seems that there was no Bluetooth Dial Up Networking detected as a phone feature though so I had to re-pair it. I added a Bluetooth DUN connection to my network settings. I did not add an Ethernet connection like it said in the documentation. Here are the settings that I got to work:

Here is the main network screen showing the DUN settings.

I clicked on the Setup Bluetooth Device to pair the Droid and had to tell it to overwrite the current pairing.

So I'm able to browse and such but certain things aren't working completely right. For example, I can't seem to ping things. TCP applications seem to mostly work but there may be some tweaking needed. I'll add to this post with what I find.