After having been invited to join the Sprint Ambassador Program, for the past few months I have been using the Samsung MM-A920 from Sprint. Till recently I had only taken advantage of their voice calls, their great online music store, and their Sprint TV service. Since Sprint offers super fast EV-DO service, I decided that it was time to try it out by using the Samsung MM-A920 as a USB modem.
The phone came with a USB cord to connect to it. I downloaded Sprint’s PCS Connection Manager and installed the software on to my laptop, along with the drivers for the phone. Windows XP picked up the phone immediately and the whole installation process went really smoothly. That impressed me a lot. Not to long ago I tried using one of my phones as a USB modem, and I can’t tell you how many hours of troubleshooting it took to get it to work – and in the end, it didn’t work, so I ended up buying a PC Card for cellular internet access. Many carriers don’t want you to use your phone as a USB modem (for obvious reasons), or they just don’t make it this easy to do. Kudos to Sprint for making the process very seamless.

Surfing the web in New York City was pretty fast. I ran a bandwidth
test which showed me that i was surfing the web at 535.6 KB per second
- that means that I would be able to download a 1 MB file in 15.7
seconds.
My
only complaint is that the Samsung MM-A920 does not charge via the USB
connection, which means that when the Samsung’s battery runs out, so
does your internet access. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but
it might be inconvenient for travelers who won’t be near an outlet for
a couple of hours. If that is the case and you are a heavy traveler,
you might want to just get a PC card for EVDO, but it is really a minor
inconvenience considering the money you would be saving by just adding
a data plan to your phone and using it as a modem.