Question for the more experienced

A friend of mine was showing me his new tablet, not the iPad but one of the other ones. He had a "bridge" app on it that let him tether his phone for free and it linked his email and everything else to the tablet. It was really cool.

I looked on the app store but could not find anything like that at all. Does our app for that have a different name than bridge? Or is there one in the works for the future?

 

Welcome to the forum! It sounds like your friend has a RIM Blackberry Playbook. If that's the case the only way for your friend to get email, etc. is to tether it to a Blackberry phone. Not so cool if you think about it because you don't need to even own a phone (or need an app for that matter) to do that with your iPad (via WiFi). You (unlike your friend) can access your email, the Internet, etc. anywhere WiFi is available. If you have an iPad with 3G you don't even need WiFi much less a smart phone.

If you don't have a 3G iPad you can indeed use a smart phone to tether your iPad if/when you don't have WiFi access. In fact most carriers will allow you to tether four or five devices to a smart phone (iPad + laptop + co-worker's laptop, etc.). All of the carriers have an additional data plan charge for that though (AKA "Hotspot"), IIRC about $20/mo. That's why I'm almost certain you were looking at a Blackberry Playbook.

FWIW I bought a 3G iPad thinking that it would be nice to be able to connect if I was anywhere that WiFi wasn't available. I travel quite a bit...and for more than a year now I have never once activated my 3G plan. So far I've always been able to find WiFi. I'm saving $120 when I buy my next iPad!

Besides the inability of the Playbook to actually access anything without connecting to a Blackberry phone, there is a laundry list of other features your iPad has that make it a far better and more practical choice IMHO.

So in the end your friend is paying more for less...IMO.

 

Yeah, so that sounds like its only a good deal then if you already have one of those phones.

I did some snooping and found out tmobile lets you do mobile hotspots for free. As it goes though I heard a while back that ATT is buying them so no point in switching. I think I'll just do like you said there and work off the wifi.

I dont see why they cant at least make an app for the net via bluetooth tethering as a work around to the mobile hotspot. We will see I guess.