I have an AT&T Tilt and when I was actively working for a 24/7 startup it was absolutely a necessity, but lately I'd been thinking  about getting something a bit smaller.  

To put size in your head if you don't know the Tilt specifically, it's a variation on the HTC TyTn which is also marketed as the Cingular 8525.  It's a slideout QWERTY device and the Tilt model has some specialties including it being full 3g and that the slideout keyboard also "tilts" so that you can put the phone on a desk and it looks like a little laptop (great for playing videos or just having a little clock/appointment calendar open all the time in front of you).  Plus, with the recent free update from WinMo 6 to 6.1 AT&T threw in a free copy of MSVoiceCommand which has the best voice recognition I've ever seen on any phone.

it's a great phone, the best I've ever had.  Seriously.

But, I don't know, but it's gotten in my head as "too big."  And that's a silly perception because it's actually slightly thinner, shorter and even less wide than my wife's Trio... maybe it's because it's not tapered, it's just a rectangular brick.

So anyway, with perception being reality I've been thinking of downsizing if I could find another 3g phone that allows tethering on my unlimited data plan.  I'd even - gasp - though of taking a break from Windows Mobile if it meant getting a smaller phone, but being a BIG user of Slingbox Mobile that was going to have to be one great non-WM phone.  

BTW: if you only know smartphones from using an iPhone then let me tell you that all of the ruckas iPhoners are yelling about to get tethering is justified... with my WinMo devices I've been a tetherer for YEARS and once you have it you know that it is the most important reason to buy any phone.

Thing is that the other 3g tethering options don't really drop the size of the phone down.  For the latest WinMos there's the Trio which is really slightly bigger than the Tilt or the new Samsung i760 (basically a 3g Blackjack) which is almost a centimeter taller and just about as thick as the Tilt.  And if I jumped the fence there's just the new Sony-Ericsson W760a, which does tethering with optional software BUT is only just a slight tad smaller than the Tilt (and gets reviews saying how lousy it is to get at functions you need because of all of the kid-targetted fluff), or  Motorola's latest RAZR, the v9x, which is finally 3g BUT it doesn't support tethering even with the extra-priced Moto PhoneTools software that let earlier RAZRs pass the wire.

So I was moping around for a few days none too happy that they can't just make a good 3g dataphone at a really small size. 

And then something cool happened.  I was sitting in my car at Bridle Trails Park yesterday, doing some coding (sometimes I have to just get out of the office and the upper parking lot is usually empty all day) and it struck me to do another google about the phone situation.  So I plugged my Tilt into my laptop and searched with different keywords... and got nothing new :(.  So I go back to my code.

And because I was online it occurred to me that I needed to check how two instances of my project (a Flash applet) would handle a certain server function when run concurrently AND I remembered that I was supposed to verify the app's connections in Safari on OSX. 

Now here's the thing, I'm tethered right?  I'm on the Internet over 3g in this big beautiful park... but standard tethering is a direct USB connection; You can do it over Bluetooth but personally I've never had great success with that and BT bandwidth sucks.    So you can only do one phone<->computer connection at a time.  Right?

Wrong.

I remembered that a while back I'd tried a thing called WMWifiRouter that turned any Windows Mobile phone that had both 3g and Wifi into a ... Wifi Router.  It was a kinda neat idea but since I tethered already it wasn't a big deal at that time.  But now it was, I really did need to have more than one connection and I really didn't want to go back to the office.  So I surfed the T4220 over to WMWifRouter.com and plunked down my 30 bucks and about 2 minutes later my car was a hotspot.  I had my MacBook AND my T4220 AND, just because I could, I also pulled the P1510 out of the glovebox and had it's XP completely netted up.  Three computers, doing highspeed right in my car. 

Yeah, any recent Windows Mobile device with wifi and 3g can use WMWIfiRouter so it's not like I couldn't still jump to a Samsung or other HTC TouchFlo-age unit  but for some reason my Tilt just looks a lot cooler now.  I think I'll keep it till the HTC Touch3d comes out in the States next year. 

And I'm definitely keeping WMWifiRouter, because even for just one laptop jumping on the Internet over the 3g is faster now that I don't have to pull out a USB cable and set up a virtual modem connection, I just start the software via MS VoiceCommand and without even taking the phone out of its belt-clip I'm connected!