In my previous post, I stated the following:
"Now to my one gripe about the Spring HTC EVO 4G. The phone seems to be
slightly crippled. The phone features a app called “Sprint Mobile Hot
Spot” which is a feature I was VERY excited about using on the job. The
feature is available on other carriers newer android phones and it
enables the phone to act as a small wireless access point, connecting
your laptop to the Internet without tethering via your own portable
wireless network. This feature is what caused Steve Jobs iPhone 4 launch to have some problems while demonstrating it’s features.
(I would like to note that the phone itself was not the problem, but
the fact that there were a lot of overlapping Wi-Fi hot spots created by
these types of phones.) This feature has lots of handy uses, but then
again, there are so many wireless networks out there now that one would
be hard pressed to not find a hot spot to use."
After some discussions with a co-worker and some light reading, I found an answer to my issue. The following link contains an article found on the website Engadget that discusses this very issue.
So it is true that Sprint has disabled this feature and will be requiring a $29.99 activation fee. It was working for a short period of time on 4G networks only according to the article mentioned above, but that was dated in July and it is now the end of August. If I had to take a logical guess as to why Sprint and probably other carriers that have this feature on newer android phones have disabled it by default and are requiring an additional activation fee would be the fact that the carriers network is not currently capable of handing the increase in data traffic. Maybe soon the networks will catch up to the demand for data connectivity.
