[General Questions and Answers] veritas718:
You will have to root

ATT charges extra for both unltd. data and tethering for general retail. (I have a corp. discounted account, and somehow still have unltd data, but I had that since before the change - I threatened to leave with the other 2 lines if they didnt I couldnt keep it - I dont have tethering since that was a feature that came later.)

At first tethering was free if you could do it. That was true even in the time of flip phones. With the right cable, and understanding of how the devices worked with each other, could do anything from upload media to (with the right drivers) set up a dial up connection in XP using the phone as the modem. GPRS was not fast, it was only practical in limited applications. 3G in general changed that. Once the average user was able to do their variety of average things, which really does use a lot of bandwidth, not like heavy torrent user, but still, enough if they use it often, carriers started making the software to support charging for the ability. The problem is that each phone has to do it differently since they dont have easy ways to delineate; carriers arent allowed to look at the data to truly know what it came from, even based on protocol alone, you cant tell anymore. So now they are slowly working out ways to lock down their devices, which come from too many manufacturers. Some of whom just dont get it. Really. (*cough* HTC)

I have been using the Samsung Captivate for a little over a year, which in itself is a small miracle, I mean, a YEAR, actually 14 months! :eek:

The reason why is that the hardware is great. This is the unbrickable phone! And I don't mean through handy gadgets, or ripping the phone apart and doing microsurgery, I mean no matter what stupid thing you do playing with roms, including pulling the USB cable out mid-process, the core BIOS is still fine 99% of the time. Whats more, is that when the phone first came out the tethering was totally open, and ANY user could just use KIES to get online. Soon after that a firmware update for the phone included the pieces necessary to charge to tether. Then I started trying the different ROMS, or was it before? I use Serendipity 6.3 because it seems to be the only thing that works reliably, and doesnt look like crap. Which is really a shame! But it is the lightweight ROM with root access, and innate tethering, and honestly, I never wanted anything else but some angry birds. Ok so the google platform, and my exchange account had to all work too. Serendipity it was, and no, could never seem to get 7 working well.

The thing is, I dont like having even to use another app to tether, which is a bit ideological. I basically refuse to pay more to use the phone when its connected to my computer. I dont want to compromise in any way on this, and using an application that is not the phone's OS uses other resources when it otherwise would not (RAM + CPU = battery use = :( ). And because ehh, Samsung/Att bloatware isnt that cool, custom boot ROMS are. Although no gf ever thought it was that cool waiting for me to get one of them on... Well I would be annoyed if that was a compromise, but who would want to go look at leaves anyway? #Winning!

Seriously though, to me it comes down to its has to be simple, and I dont want to charge my phone 8 times a day for simple! Have you guys seen the size of this screen! Thats not even practical. Id hate to walk around with that in my pants. But since I am due for an upgrade, Im just going to wait until the thanksgiving sales to see if anything else comes out (which I doubt). Looking at the Skyrocket, it's a beast. For one thing this phone has "4G speeds delivered by HSPA+ (with enhanced backhaul)" which means it can go REALLY REALLY fast like 1-2mb/s not mbps, Mb down. Thats like little fios in my pocket! and theres a 1850 mAh battery stock (better if your going to make me carry around a small table top!) which there really is no way around with a 1.5ghz dual core, 1gb or RAM and a WVGA screen.

Personally I really liked the concept of smaller handset with a tablet/netbook to dock in, but apparently I was alone there. And HTC just doesnt make nice devices, sorry, but Samsung is just a much larger company, and it seems the better motorola phones are still coming out for V so for Att, Samsung it is.. At least they're easy to root.