How to use the Nokia n82 as a bluetooth modem to access the internet from a laptop

My Nokia n70 is started to get old so I ordered a new Nokia n82 phone the other day.

Yesterday it arrived and I moved over my contacts and played around with it a bit. My first impressions are positive. It’s a lot faster and more responsive than my old phone, which is not really a surprise. The display is amazing, and overall I don’t think it looks as bad as people have been saying in various blogs.

However, I didn’t try to use it as a bluetooth modem to access internet through the 3G connection from my MacBook Pro until on the train to work this morning. To my surprise I couldn’t get it to work even though when adding it as a new bluetooth device one can choose to use it to access the internet.

With my old n70 phone that was all I had to do to get it to work. I messed around with all the settings without getting anywhere. When pressing the connect button it would just say “Connecting…” for a few seconds and then switch over to “Disconnecting…” and hang with that message forever until I would kill -9 the ppp process.

Quite a bit of googling later I found out that Nokia has released a plugin to iSync for it to support the n82. After I installed that plugin and re-setup the phone as a bluetooth device it started to work!

If you have the same problem try the Nokia iSync plugin until Apple updates iSync with native support for the n82.