Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Dec 03, 2006

If you have a Nokia N73 and are using Mac OS X, you may want to take advantage of the phone's built-in bluetooth along with your wireless data package to connect your Mac laptop to the Internet via your phone. After all, not everyone is nice enough to offer you a free WiFi connection and sometimes you just need to get online. Well, the bad news is that by default Mac OS X does not support using your Nokia N73 as a modem. But the good news is that the community has created a way for you to workaround that.

The most difficult part of this exercise is that it's going to require StuffIt Expander. Stuffit is not exactly what I'd call a popular application and so I hope in the future people decide to use tar, zip, or rar for compression purposes instead.

That being said, head over to Ross Barkman's Home Page and grab the package called Scripts for Nokia 3G (EDGE/UMTS) phones [direct link provided]. It's only 17k so don't worry about being short on time before you start the download.

Once you have the package, you'll need to use Stuffit to expand the contents. Inside you'll find a convenient ReadMe as well as 2 scripts called Nokia 3G CID1 and Nokia 3G CID2. You only really need the CID1 but go ahead and copy both of them into your computer's Library/Modem Scripts folder. Note that this isn't your user's Library! So if you open up ~/Library and wonder why you don't see a Modem Scripts folder then this is why. You need to go to the root of your Computer, open Library, and then open Modem Scripts. You should see a slew of files that by default came with Mac OS X 10.4.

Once you've dropped the files into the Modem Scripts folder, go ahead and open the Internet Connect application. From here, select Bluetooth, and edit the configuration by choosing (you guessed it) Edit Configurations.

This will pop open a dialog box where you get to describe your connection (I called mine Nokia N73) and pick a modem script. Select "Nokia 3G CID1" and click ok. You don't need to fill out any of the other information as we'll be using a bluetooth connection along with a 2.5G or 3G data package.

The only thing left to do now is make sure that bluetooth is enabled on both your Nokia N73 and your Mac laptop. Hit 'Connect' and watch it connect you up using your phones data connection!

The Nokia scripts were released by Ross as 'Pintware' so go to his home page and donate a couple of bucks if you feel you can quantify your thanks.