More Adventures With The EVO 4G

The HTC EVO had a good 4G reception sitting on top of the GT5 Collectors Edition box...Coincidence? Perhaps...

If you have been keeping up with my previous EVO 4G posts, I have been trying to discover new uses for this magical phone from the future. So far, I have used it effectively as a heads up display and a GPS data logger for automobile racing.

Yesterday, I went over to my friend Jason's house to play a game known to many people as GT5. Long story short, our DSL internet connection in the friendly city of El Monte isn't really up to par with the cable internet that other cities can afford. The 680MB game update would have taken a week on El Monte's DSL service.

I have tethered my HTC EVO 4G before into my laptop for concept testing a few weeks back. Now was the EVO's chance to prove itself worthy of an epic tether. Although El Monte overall has crappy DSL, it has a few isolated pockets of 4G coverage all over North El Monte. We found a comfortable spot in his living room that had a beacon of 4G coverage and commenced tethering the phone to his Apple Powerbook laptop. Success. The Powerbook was now connected to the internets via a 4G data stream. Next we converted his Powerbook into a router and connected it to the Playstation 3 via an ethernet cable. The next part was a bit tricky. The PS3 had trouble logically connecting to the makeshift 4G router but with the help of the internets, we discovered that we needed to enable "Internet Sharing" in the Powerbook via the control panel and then had to do the following:

OS X 10.5:

1. Start Internet Sharing if it's not already running.
2. In Terminal, type cp /etc/bootpd.plist /tmp/bootpd.plist
3. Stop Internet Sharing.
4. Open /tmp/bootpd.plist for editing using TextEdit or whatever.
5. Locate this section of the file, near the end:

   reply_threshold_seconds
   4

6. Change the value 4 to 0.
7. In Terminal, type sudo cp /tmp/bootpd.plist /etc
8. Start Internet Sharing.
9. If you want to, check that your change to /etc/bootpd.plist hasn't been reverted.

Finally, after an hour of fan-dangling, the PS3 was well on its way updating this fabled game known as GT5. So how long did it take to download a 680MB update while speed testing the connection and doing some light browsing? Less than 25 minutes....

Lessons learned:
1.) The interwebs are very powerful.
2.) The HTC EVO 4G is either from the future or has been reverse engineered from Area 51 Alien technology.
3.) 4G gobbles battery power similar to college students guzzling beer during happy hour...While the phone is tethered via USB, it is also charging the phone's battery. However with 4G enabled, the 4G data link almost over powers the battery charging. I commenced battery charging at 25% battery life with the 4G data link enabled to keep my laptop internet radio stream and pidgin service alive for 8 hours while I slept. When I woke up, the battery was charged to 28%.