When I first thought of getting the Nokia N95-8GB I was not sure how you would go about using it in the US. I never owned an unlocked phone and having been with AT&T for the last two years in a rather satisfactory fashion, I wondered what I needed to do.
In essence, all that is necessary is to take out the SIM card from your old AT&T phone and pop it into the N95. Still, to take advantage of it to the fullest extent, and for me that means a mobile photo studio with immediate uploads to Facebook and Share on Ovi, you need broadband. The N95 is great with WiFi connectivity that puts my truly awful Lenovo T61p laptop’s to shame. But on the go, you need 3G and AT&T has it. The upside, though, is that you can apparently spring for the cheapest of their mobile plans, the $15/month (MEdia Net Unlimited) as it does not count as a PDA (no QWERTY keyboard). For the money, you get unlimited data connectivity which with the N95-8GB means – tethering.
In other words, the N95 can be used as your cellular network broadband modem for your laptop. Connectivity is a snap using a USB cable and the dedicated program provided in the Nokia PC Suite. While I would not recommend running BitTorrent off of it so as not to raise the ire of AT&T, you will get a very impressive (for a phone) 3.5G 460Kb/s speed. It already saved a couple of sales meetings for me where wired and wireless connections were impossible to use. This being a Symbian phone, once you are done with your connection, you better reboot the phone as it will go into a weird state – not that it would tell you about it. Phone calls were not made or received. In short – just reboot. Oh, and the battery gets drained very quickly so play it safe and lug around the phone’s charger.
That said, tethering (or MMS…) is impossible with an iPhone. I take my joyful bit and run with them…
