End User: Bites from the Apple: Tether Ball

The gadgetosphere rose up in a unified high-five earlier this week to celebrate the arrival of Nullriver's NetShare application in the iTunes App Store. What this app does is enable you to "tether" your laptop to your iPhone's and use the iPhone's cellular connectivity (either 3G or EDGE) to access the Internet using an ad-hoc Wi-Fi connection between the two devices. Plainly put--you can now surf the Web on your MacBook without a Wi-Fi hotspot. Check out Engadget's hands-on video of setting up NetShare.

Many cell phones offer this feature using Bluetooth's DUN (Dial-up Networking) profile, but Apple has been very stingy in its inclusion of Bluetooth profiles for the OG iPhone and iPhone 3G, providing just the headset (HSP) and handsfree (HFP) profiles (ignoring other handy profiles such as A2DP stereo music streaming or BPP printing). And part of the reason might be pushback from Apple's cell partners who were wary of losing money to all the bandwidth hogged by iPhone users' insatiable hunger for Internet connectivity.

And as many predicted, the joy didn't last long as the NetShare app inexplicably vanished on Thursday, causing quite the rumble through the gadgetosphere. But as of late morning on Friday (as we're writing this post), NetShare is back and downloadable from the App Store, so the spigot is turned back on. But be wary: although the "unlimited" iPhone data plan is considered is considered all-you-can-eat, AT&T does restrict laptop users to 5 GB upload/download per month. Thus, if you start running up your usage to those heights, you might be hearing from AT&T. (Hat tip to all-things-wireless guru Glenn Fleishman, as tethered via Jeff Carlson.)

Rumor Rundown: With Apple warning of upcoming shortages, it looks like we'll be seeing a MacBook/MacBook Pro refresh come September, with the possibility of a glass trackpad with multi-touch and gesture input (see Boy Genius Report). Slippery Brick counters with the possibility of a new 64 MB iPod touch with GPS capabilities. And iLounge adds that a new iPod nano may be in the works that moves away from its fatty redesign from last year and moves into tall, thin Zune territory (see iLounge's artist's rendering below). Then there's the rumor that the iPod shuffle is going to get a bump to 4 GB with a possible "slight redesign."
Speaking of Microsoft's digital audio player, the most visible Zune fan out there (the guy who got the Zune logo tattooed to his arm) has fallen out of love and hooked up with an iPod touch on the rebound (via Cult of Mac).
Hooray! A new iTunes update has been released (7.7.1) that fixes accented characters that the 7.7 update horked (which will happily restore readability to my Chanson Française playlist).
Who needs an iPhone when you can get most of the functionality (sans cellular connectivity) with the iPod touch? asks Kevin Purdy over at Lifehacker (noting it will only set you back $300 compared to more than $1600 over the course of a 2-year iPhone contract).
If you need to carry some electronic documents around with you, but don't want to haul your laptop, check out FileMagnet at the App Store (hat tip to ZDNet's The Apple Core). It enables you to synchronize files from your desktop to your iPhone/iPod touch, eliminating the hassle of the Gmail workaround (sending it to your Gmail account and then having to download it).
And finally, Mad Magazine jumps on the Apple bandwagon with its Calvin and Jobs comic strip (via Macenstein):