Share mobile internet with your Samsung Galaxy S3

So you are at a cafe or restaurant and for some stupid reason the wireless they offer seems to fail you. Constantly connecting / disconnecting or losing the signal, which can be very very irritating. This happened to me recently and I was very annoyed. Sitting out in the summer garden having your meal or cup of coffee and you want to check some stuff on your laptop/pad but you can't seem to get the signal. Well good news for you if you are a Samsung Galaxy S3 user. I will show you in few easy steps how to share your phone's mobile internet to your laptop!

Ok first things first.

1. Open the settings in your Samsung Galaxy S3

2. Click on "More Settings"

3. Click on "Tethering and portable hotspot" and click on the On/Off button next to it. It will give you a message "Attention - Enabling portable Wi-Fi hotspot will turn off Wi-Fi"  Click OK and don't worry about it.

4. Click on "Portable Wi-Fi hotspot.." There you can see your details about how to connect to your phone's mobile internet. 

These are the default settings.

• Open your laptop and search for a wireless network named "AndroidAP" (obviously you can change the name, password, security etc.)
• Click connect 
• Type in the password as shown on your phone (like in the picture above)
• There you have it! Internet on your laptop/Pad directly by your phone.

WARNING: using mobile internet via your mobile phone is the same thing as if you are using it with your Galaxy S3. Which means if you are paying for bandwidth it will charge you. Make sure you have good mobile plan when you download stuff and browse so you don't have to pay a lot. 

*Advanced part*

5. You can configure the settings of the sharing of mobile internet by clicking on "Configure" button (as shown on previous picture)

You can edit the Wi-Fi network name, the security type and password. Once ready - click "Save"

6. You can add Allowed devices list to connect to your phone's mobile internet. Click on "Allowed devices" as shown in 5) 

7. Once in "Allowed devices", click on the top right "+" button and add your device's name and mac address

That's it. This is how you can easily use your phone's internet on your laptop/pad or any device. If you have a good mobile plan with fast and cheap internet (like monthly subscription) this is a very cool thing to use. You can share your internet when you are on a meeting, with friends, family or anyone who needs internet to interact with you but does not have a mobile plan or wi-fi available at the moment. 

If you have any questions or need help - use the comments section or the contact form. 

Keep rockin'!

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Samsung Galaxy S3 vs Ubuntu 12.04

So... OK, I got this new Samsung Galaxy SIII and I wanted to explore my files and transfer some music to my phone via USB cable. Apparently, Samsung did some bad magic and by default you are not able to explore your device using MTP in ubuntu (haven't checked in other distros but I've read people had same problem). Since I'm using kUbuntu, opening dolphin explorer mounted my Galaxy S3  as "camera" and I was not able to create/paste any files into it(Unknown error). So after some time googling around, i'm finally able to operate my phone via USB cable and a cool little program. Here's a simple guide what you should do to be able to transfer files to your device.

1. Make sure when connecting your device to Ubuntu via USB cable you select the Media device connection type.

2. Open up the terminal and either use the "sudo" command or just do this as root:

'apt-get update', 'apt-get upgrade' when your update is ready or you have nothing to update check out this:
'apt-cache search libmtp'
 so you see results like this:

libmtp-common - Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) common files

libmtp-dbg - Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) debugging symbols

libmtp-dev - Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) development files

libmtp-doc - Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) library documentation

libmtp-runtime - Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) runtime tools

libmtp9 - Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) library

mtp-tools - Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) library tools

gmtp - simple MP3 player client for MTP based devices

python-pymtp - Pythonic binding to LibMTP to interact with MTP devices

Just to be sure I installed everything without the doc and debug package.

You can do that easily by this command: (copy and paste in your terminal)

sudo apt-get install libmtp-common libmtp-dev libmtp-runtime libmtp9 mtp-tools gmtp python-pymtp

3. Now install one more thingy:

sudo apt-get install libusb-dev

4. Reboot

5. The program you installed in step 2 "gmtp" is the software you will use to transfer files. The trick is: 

launch gmtp (either from Applications-->Multimedia-->gMTP or ALT+F2 "gmtp") now plug in the cable into your device and click "Connect" in gMTP fast. 

6. Give it few seconds to detect the device and select either Phone or SDcard to operate with. 

7. After you have selected the storage to operate with you will view the files like this:

There you have it! I can confirm that this software works. I have transferred my pictures, music and files this way.

I've read somewhere about an application that can do this via wireless (like Kies for windows) but haven't tried it yet. When I do, I will make a tutorial for it as well. 

Hope I've helped you and if you have any questions, please use the comments.

Device: Samsung Galaxy S3

Hardware: Lenovo Z580

OS: Kubuntu 12.04

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