Independent software developer Alex King really wants to use his BlackBerry 8700 as a modem for his Mac. In fact, he has started a bounty, currently at $60, for anyone who can develop a way to tether a BlackBerry 8700 to a Mac running OS X.
As far as I can tell, no one has yet come up with a way to tether a BlackBerry 8700 to a Mac (running Mac OS X) to use it as a modem. This works on the PC, so its likely a matter of reverse engineering to get it working on OS X.
Alex is throwing $50 of his own money into the pot. If you would like to contribute to the bounty,”PayPal some cash”, to Alex and he will add it to bounty.
Here are the terms for the bounty:
- The working solution must work on both MacBooks (including Pro) and PowerBooks and it must work with a BlackBerry 8700 on T-Mobile and Cingular.
- If the solution is not made available for free (ie. is packaged as a commercial product), anyone who contributed to the Bounty must be given a free license.
- The solution must be found by September 30th, 2006.
- If no solution is found by that time, I will refund the bounty contributions (via PayPal).
Hard to belive that RIM does not have a Mac driver for the BB. Of all the mobile devices out right now, I’d think that the BB would be most approved of by Mac users. This kind of oversight is just silly by a company the calibur of RIM.
With that said, I wish I had some driver programming skills – I’d go after that bounty!
Good luck to Alex!