I’m a member of the Sprint Ambassador program, which means they’ve supplied me with test equipment in the past. A few weeks ago, I received an UpStage in the mail – and couldn’t wait to give ‘er a whirl. I have yet to try downloading any kind of content with the device, although that’s a huge selling point for users who appreciate convenience.

I’ve been too busy futzing with the damn Cingular Blackjack and its lack of charging-by-USB to busy myself with other phones on other mobile networks. The UpStage does not charge by USB, either – which is a tremendous shortcoming and engineering oversight (in my very humble opinion). To add insult to injury, neither one has a mini-USB port.

With the last Ambassador lease, I tethered the Samsung SPH-a920 to my Thinkpad and used it (largely) as a modem, which allowed me to get online without draining the battery for my old “normal” cell phone (the Cingular 2125).

Here’s the message the team just sent to me the other day, regarding connectivity via Bluetooth in OS X:

The Sprint Ambassador Team wants to reach out to you for solutions. Since launching Phase III, we’ve received multiple requests on how to connect your Phone-As-A-Modem with a Mac via Bluetooth. In Phase I, an Ambassador posted a great work-around way of doing this with the Samsung A920.

A few of you have tried this same solution, but have reported to us that you’re unable to make it work with the new Samsung phone. We understand that the Phone-As-Modem feature has been one of the most popular among Ambassadors. Unfortunately, Sprint currently doesn’t have official instructions for how to do this on a Mac, but we greatly valued the publicly shared instructions provided by NoDRM, so we wanted to open this up to you all for help.

If you have a successful solution to pairing your Samsung phone-as-a-modem with a Mac, please email us back your instructions and we’ll be sure to try it out. If it works, we’ll send it out to all the Sprint Ambassadors (of course, crediting you) so that we can build a shared knowledge.

I’m happy thrilled to report that I had no problems getting the UpStage to act as a Bluetooth modem on OS X. Astounded, actually, at how simple it was to set up (per nodrm’s instructions). I didn’t even dare try it in Windows, given the painful Bluetooth experiences I’ve had with XP and Vista in the past. Moreover, I’m starting to take the Macbook with me on trips more and more. Why? It just works (especially power management)!

As a side note, the UpStage’s EVDO is much faster than my ClearWire connection – palpably. ClearWire makes for a great backup Internet service, but I don’t know if I could necessarily recommend ‘em as a primary ISP (no matter how much you may hate the phone or cable company). Still waiting for someone to get back to me on Gnomedex sponsorship, although I’m not holding my breath.

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