With just 5 short days left on the deadline for my bounty for tethering a BlackBerry 8700 to a Mac as a modem (bounty currently at $610 $675, please contribute!), there are suddenly a few rumblings. Perhaps someone will claim the bounty after all! Will anyone make the Sept. 30 deadline?
In the BlackBerry forums, one fellow has found a Linux app that could be ported to OS X. I’ve also been contacted by a couple of folks who say they are looking into it, but aren’t sure they’ll meet the deadline.
Let me clarify that the solution doesn’t need to be polished and published on Sept. 30th, it just has to be discovered and demonstrated to me. If you’re close and can demonstrate basic proof-of-concept1, that could be enough to extend the deadline a little as well.
If it takes fudging the deadline to get a working solution, that’s what I’ll do. But if no one can show they are close on Sept 30th, I’ll be issuing the refunds.
I’m really hoping to give this money away.
- Of course, whoever does it first, gets the bounty. [back]
[…] We talked about this a while back, and he’s still at it. Blogger Alex King is attempting to tether his BlackBerry 8700 to a Mac, and is offering some coin up to any party that can lend a hand. Our last report had the price at $400, but now, with only 5 days left to solve the issue, the price is up to $610. Check out the rest of the deets at Alex’s site. […]
[…] Read more… […]
As one of the contributors to the pot, I’m happy to let my portion stand as long as necessary.
Our company has produced a bluetooth enabled PPP stack for the 8700 that works with the Mac. Unfortunately the BB itself does not provide us with the APIs we need to actually reroute the raw IP datagrams coming from the computer, so we can’t actually forward what we’re getting from the mac directly to the network.
We should have a workaround developed over the next week or so.
-Daniel
[…] I’ve just tested a development build that allowed me to browse the web and download mail. Awesome! Daniel claims the bounty. […]
[…] permalink Congratulations and thanks to Daniel Pasco, who has created a fantastic solution for using the BlackBerry 870* series as a Bluetooth modem in Mac OS X. I’ve just tested a development build that allowed me to browse the web and download mail. Awesome! Daniel claims the bounty. Daniel is hard at work polishing it up and quashing the little quirks that exist in the early dev stages of any product, but it already has been tested and works with the 8700g (T-Mobile) and the 8703e (Sprint and Verizon). Hopefully a version will be available for testing to all of the bounty contributors soon. More details as I have them. Again, thanks and congrats to Daniel. He’s worked his tail off on this. Great job! BlackBerry OS X Tethering Bounty Winner: Daniel Pasco! [Alex King via jkOnTheRun] […]
That totally rocks. I’ve been waiting for this tool for a long time !!!
Are there plans to provide support for the Cingular version of the 8700? Additionally, the FAQ says a proxy server will be provided that can run as a daemon on a Linux server – is this source code or binary? Will there be a Darwin compatible version or binary provided? Thanks in advance! – Jon
ummm wasn’t the deadline the end of september?
[…] I have, however, been in touch quite a bit this week with Daniel Pasco. Daniel has been working feverishly to meet the bounty deadline, and I’ve used a pretty darn interesting looking proof of concept app he put together. […]
I’m closing comments here, please add any questions, etc. to the FAQ post.