geekyI'm surprised they are still sending those birthday certificates. I never renewed my Safari Club membership after the first year and it's been a few years already.
The Sprint PCS Wireless Web Kit arrived via Fedex today. Funny thing about Fedex is they used to knock on the door and wait for someone to come out to sign for the package. Not any more. Now, the Fedex carrier just leaves the package and gets the heck out of here. Hmm...
The kit comes with a software CD, a manual, a male-female serial adapter and the all-important cable that connects the phone to the serial port. Basically, all you need is the cable. The phone itself functions as a modem and supports the Hayes (AT) command set. Setup is therefore very easy. If you've already set things up for a regular modem, just plug the cable and phone in, change the connection speed to 19200 bps and you're set.
The Navas Group has some useful info on setting up a wireless web connection with Sprint PCS.
As I mentioned, my Compaq LTE-5100 has an old version of Debian Linux installed so I played around with the settings in pppconfig until it worked. The Sprint QNC setup didn't work, most likely because pppd circa 1998 does not have automatic DNS configuration. Newer versions of pppd would probably handle this better. I just used one of NIC's dialup numbers and that worked quite well. I was able to fire up Netscape (version 4.6... heheh) and take a look at a couple of websites. It's not broadband but it'll do when I'm away from home. Just have to get used to browsing the web with images turned off.