One of the most sought after features for the iPhone is tethering. That is using your iPhone’s 3G (or EDGE) cellular broadband connection to use with your laptop. This feature’s availability would certainly sell more iPhones for Apple and might even make more money for AT&T (in the US).

However no official tethering has been announced by either Apple of AT&T. Jail-broken iPhones with some terminal hacks have accomplished tethering, but it is not supported by Apple or AT&T and is not for everyone.

NetShare [direct iTunes link, at least it was], and iPhone app showed up unannounced in Apple’s iTunes App Store for purchase last night for $9.99 that allowed iPhone users to connect their Macs (or PCs) to the Internet using the cellular network. As you might imagine this caused quite a stir among iPhone users. For the price of two lattes at my favorite coffee chain, road warriors could gain what some Blackberry and Windows Mobile have, a way to connect to the Internet when there is no hotspot in sight.

Here is were the story gets weird. Within 20 minutes of the NetShare app appearing in the US iTunes Store it disappeared without a word from Apple. Only a few lucky iPhone owners were able to snag a copy. This instantly gave the NetShare app a special place in Apple history!

This disappearance confused iPhone owners and the developers as they claim to have never heard a word why the app was pulled. No one knows for sure if posting it for sale was a mistake or if it was meant to be sold in other country stores only.

Even weirder, the NetShare app shows up again earlier this evening for sale! This time I snagged a copy as soon as I saw it. Now as of this writing it was pulled from the US store yet again! I have no idea if it is pulled permanently or not.

Well as weird is all this is. The question you may have is does it work?

I was able to set it up with my iPhone 3G and my MacBook Pro and put it thru its paces. In fact I posted this using my MacBook Pro using Mars Edit tethered to my iPhone 3G.

Set up is a bit involved for non techies, but Nullriver does provide decent instructions. I found it worked quite well. I could not think of a better app for iPhone and MacBook Air owners. This would be a match made in heaven.

You can even have multiple devices join the ad-hoc WiFi network created when using NetShare an your iPhone by having the second computer simply join the created network on the first. See NetShare uses networking to accomplish sharing the iPhone’s cellular broadband network which is a bit different from true tethering where the cell phone becomes your computer’s modem.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out with tethering now that the “app is out of the bag” so to say. Should be very entertaining.

MacRumors has a nice tutorial on how to set this up with your Mac. See Windows XP instructions here.

Tips: Once you set this up create a Location in your Network settings for using the NetShare with your Mac as this will make it easy to call this up when you want.

Also, on the iPhone set the screen lock timer to never turn off while using it as I found it disconnected me when the screen closed. Speeds will depend on the signal strength and if you are in a 3G area. It is generally never as fast as Wi-Fi hotspots, but is as fast as it is on your iPhone. Lucky for me my house is in a 3G area and my results were very good. Plenty fast enough to browse and post to a blog.

Note: Since we have no idea what Apple’s and even more importantly AT&Ts take on the use of this app, I suggest if you were lucky enough to get it, use it sparingly. Unlimited data, is NOT really unlimited data. Tethering may still be against AT&T’s user agreement, even though you have that receipt from the iTunes Store.

Anyway, thank you Nullriver for a very useful app that adds yet another missing iPhone feature. Maybe video recording next?

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