I’m guessing the majority of people who’ve bought iPads are already iPhone owners, and of those who bought the non-3G iPads I’m also guessing most have felt a bit annoyed about the fact that you can’t tether your iPad to your iPhone (or any other phone). So basically even though the iPad has both Bluetooth and WiFi (as does the iPhone) and there is no good technical reason for it, Apple prevents you from having this arrangement:

Basically the iPad and the iPhone don’t even recognize each other via Bluetooth, and the only way to use the iPhone as a WiFi hotspot is to jailbreak it :(

If you have a regular WiFi hotspot this doesn’t matter of course, since the iPad will just connect using that instead. But unfortunately my ADSL connection won’t be established for 7-10 days, and that’s a long time to wait!

Now unlike the iPad, the iMac can tether to the iPhone (and actually works surprisingly well with 1.5Mbps downloads). So with a little bit of dicking around I can set up a direct WiFi connection to the iMac and use Internet Sharing* to bridge the WiFi connection to the Bluetooth one, resulting in the following:

A little more roundabout but hey it gets the job done…. EXCEPT… it so happens that when the iMac is in WiFi host mode it only supports WEP encryption, and there is some weird bug in the iPad at the moment that screws up the password to WEP connections, so if I want to run with this arrangement I have to leave the WiFi unsecured (in which case some random neighbor could connect and start hosing my precious phone bandwidth).

So the next thing I’ll try (as soon as I get a Cat-5 network cable) will involve a second bridge via the Airport wireless router, resulting in this charmingly simple arrangement:

This way I should be finally be able to access my iPhone’s 3G connection securely from the iPad.

So simple.

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* In OS X go to System Preferences > Sharing > Internet Sharing