Buying a netbook / supercompact.

[Lucidor]

I've fallen for the Acer Timeline 1810 TZ - with an OKish processor and decent amounts of RAM, together with a screen and keyboard that are actually usable.

Any experience in the category?

Will my 3g phone work as a modem over bluetooth in a pinch?

This is basically the computer, only with 4 gigs of RAM and bluetooth

[BuddhaRhubarb]

looks like a newer faster version of the acer I'm using right now. (which has been linux'd but was originally a windows box) nice. I'm very happy with it.

[derspiess]

Will my 3g phone work as a modem over bluetooth in a pinch?

Depends on your phone, and possibly your carrier.  My carrier charges extra for tethering, if you're lucky enough for them to support it on your phone.

Not wanting to pay Sprint twice for data, I've been using PDANet for about 2 years now (first on my WinMo 6.1 phone & now on my Android phone).  Works like a charm, though I've only been tethering via USB rather than bluetooth.  With Sprint's EVDO Rev A (their version of 3G) I get nearly 2Mbps download speeds.

Here's PDANet's site.  They have a free 30 day trial, and the license is well worth the $30 IMO: http://www.junefabrics.com/

[DontSayBanana]

Re the modem tethering: as long as you have a data plan that will allow you to tether, the only reason you wouldn't be able to do that is if there's a conflict between Acer and RIM's bluetooth stacks, but a cursory search is showing no complaints about that sort of issue.  As far as the data, be prepared to spend money.  I don't know about other places, but here in the US, T-Mobile is the only carrier that doesn't charge extra for tethering (I use USB tethering on my EDGE BlackBerry so that I can pick up my email where I can't just leech a WiFi connection).

[derspiess]

Re the modem tethering: as long as you have a data plan that will allow you to tether, the only reason you wouldn't be able to do that is if there's a conflict between Acer and RIM's bluetooth stacks, but a cursory search is showing no complaints about that sort of issue.  As far as the data, be prepared to spend money.  I don't know about other places, but here in the US, T-Mobile is the only carrier that doesn't charge extra for tethering (I use USB tethering on my EDGE BlackBerry so that I can pick up my email where I can't just leech a WiFi connection).

But the other carriers only charge if they know you are tethering

PDANet is able to make the data look like it is only being used by the phone, rather than by the laptop it's tethered to.  So as far as my carrier knows, I just use a lot of data on my phone

[Lucidor]

I'll drop my phone company a mail and ask about tethering.