Thinking of switching from iPad 3g to iPad Wifi + iPhone hotspot

[Sardukar]

I mostly use my iPad out and about (cafes, on the train, etc). I currently pay £10 on a month whenever I use 3G with O2 (which is every month pretty much).

I am thinking of not paying the extra £100 for 3G and rather than paying £10 a month instead pay a few pounds extra a month on the new O2 iPhone tariffs to have a 1GB data account which can be used for hotspotting.

The other thing I won't have unless I tether is GPS built into the iPad.

Has anyone done a similar switch and if so how have you got on? What is the iPhone hotspot battery like?

 

[Zcott]

It's not a bad chance. I switched from iPad 1 3G to iPad 2 wifi and I'm tethering my iPhone 4 on Three. It's not quite as seamless as 3G - you have to occasionally go into Personal Hotspot to turn it on or at least remind the iPhone that it's on - but there are no issues with connection at all, and it's fast.

 

[blueroom]

That's what I'm doing. I'll Hotspot via Bluetooth whenever I can, much lower battery drain on both the iPhone & iPad. When I use my MBP same thing. The WiFi hotspot is handy when with a friend for coffee.

 

[vito]

It's not a bad chance. I switched from iPad 1 3G to iPad 2 wifi and I'm tethering my iPhone 4 on Three. It's not quite as seamless as 3G - you have to occasionally go into Personal Hotspot to turn it on or at least remind the iPhone that it's on - but there are no issues with connection at all, and it's fast.

Yep, even though Personal Hotspot is ON I sometimes have to turn it OFF/ON for it to work! Other than that it's blazing

 

[thelookingglass]

Here's another vote for the switch. Works great so far. I usually just leave PersonalHotspot on these days on my iPhone. One flick of the BT switch on the iPad and I'm off and running. Battery life so far has been fine.

As for the GPS, you've already got it if you have an iPhone. I've never really understood why people need to have it in two devices. The few times I've used turn by turn navigation on an iDevice, its been my iPhone and I've placed it on my dashboard right in front of the speedometer. Can't do that with an iPad!

 

[TheCheapGeek]

I am doing this too but currently doing wifi only, bluetooth from iphone to ipad now works? What are the advantages over wifi? Is battery life as mentioned above the only one?

 

[delacruzjeff]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8F190 Safari/6533.18.5)

which is faster personal hotspot using wifi or Bluetooth? Also is the battery on iPhone a lot better using Bluetooth hotspot as compared to wifi hotspot?

 

[hipnetic]

FYI, there's another thread on this subject here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1125404/

 

[Peanut207]

I gave up my unlimited data for the personal hotspot feature and I'm loving it! It's fast, convenient and the battery drain is excellent. Looked at my past few months data usage and I wasn't coming anywhere near the 4GB/month mark.

I would definitely recommend personal hotspot if you see that you don't come near the 4GB/month even if you're grandfathered into the unlimited data plan.