Less than a week after the Treo 650’s release, TreoCentral reader showmite has figured out a patch to enable Dial-Up Networking (DUN) on his Sprint Treo 650. The DUN functionality appears to be slightly unstable and has some quirks, but it works!
Dial-Up Networking lets you use your Treo 650 as a modem (connecting wirelessly via Bluetooth) to a Bluetooth compatible laptop or desktop. Readers are reporting getting transfer speeds over 250 kilobits per second and their laptops.
According to showmite, the DUN functionality was never removed from the Sprint Treo 650. Rather, palmOne’s engineers just hid the DUN enable checkbox. By installing showmite’s patched file, the DUN enable checkbox appears again.
The discovery was just posted earlier this afternoon, so we don’t know all of the bugs yet. One reader reports that "With the patch installed and BT DUN turned on, the Treo 650 takes a while (around 15 seconds or so) to turn on after I press the power button. When I turn off BT DUN, the Treo turns on as soon as I press the button."
Showmite offered the following suggestions: "Yes, I too have noticed a couple bugs. It would appear the DUN was never fully tested (they never expected it to be fixed ). The best advice is to turn it off when not needed and always turn it off before turning off bluetooth... Do it all in order and it seems to work quite well."
Over the weekend, JuneFabrics' released a beta version of PDANet that offers similar functionality.
Sprint has announced that they will officially enable DUN support in a future firmware release. Their claim that DUN on the Treo is not enabled out-of-the-box because it wasn't prime-time ready appears to have been correct.
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