Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me share my iPhone data to my iPad

Dear Aunt TUAW,

I find myself in an interesting position. I am going to be traveling for several weeks within the US. I have my iPhone on a grandfathered unlimited data plan and a wifi iPad 2.

I would like to be able to use my iPad while away not only for FaceTime but also general use and even using my slingbox. I would rather keep my unlimited data plan, have thought about using an airport express but that might be cost prohibitive given hotel charges.

Is there anything I have missed? If you post this to the blog I would prefer to remain anonymous. Thanks for the help and the great website!

Your loving nephew,

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

It's pretty easy to share a connection between a non-jailbroken iPhone and a Mac using any of the iProxy-style SOCKS proxy solutions. You can Google up web pages galore about these solutions -- and a new proxy client seems to appear weekly on App Store before it gets pulled a few hours later.

At the same time, it's rather hard to share between an iPhone and an iPad without jaibreaking. That's because you need some sort of shared Wi-Fi network and the iPhone cannot create an ad hoc connection without being jailbroken.

There are various solutions around but most of them rely on you having a laptop along as well as the two devices, to create that ad hoc network. That makes things even clumsier and harder to set up.

In general, you'll do best either by jailbreaking and using MyWi or by buying or renting a third party Wi-Fi hotspot (like Clear or MiFi). Unfortunately, if you do enable iPhone tethering through AT&T, you will give up your unlimited plan. Some TUAW folk have done exactly that -- freeing themselves from feeling they must hold onto the unlimited plan for dear life.

Hugs,

Auntie T.