A Nokia, a Mac and a mobile miracle

Sometimes miracles happen in the strangest of circumstances. This is a story of my mobile miracle - it may not match the raising of Lazarus or the feeding of the 5000, but to me it was just as unexpected and wonderful.

The miracle? I managed to set up my Nokia N73 as a 3G data modem for my MacBook Pro without any human assistance or software wizards. And they're even connected via Bluetooth.

To top it all, the network I'm using - Three - says the data modem option is not Mac-compatible and has no online help guides for PCs either.

In fact, the only advice the Indian call center operativecould give about the £45 a month feature was using the 3 Software CD (Windows XP only, lost years ago) or logging on to Planet Three , clicking Services and activating the 'Use phone as modem' option (no such option exists).

I searched Three's website in vain for any mention of Add Wireless Web but could find only one lonely pop-up offering the briefest of descriptions about the service - 512MB a month limit, a quid a meg above that - and no set-up info.

And to cap it all, Macbook's operating system only offered out-of-the-box modem support for GPRS connections over mobile phones. My chances of success seemed on a par with those of Emily Parr being elected head of the Commission for Racial Equality.

But the prospect of wasting £45 is a powerful motivator. I Googled 'Mac 3G data modem' and up came Ross Barkman's Home Page. The lovely Ross has ccreated Mac 3G modem scripts for a wide variety of mobiles including - Hallelujah! - the Nokia N73.

I downloaded the free script, dropped it in my Modem Scripts folder and tried to connect to the Internet via the N73.

Inevitably nothing happened.

So I read the Read Me file. There's a first time for everything after all.

It suggested that I put Three's Access Point Number - three.co.uk - into the telephone number field of the Mac's Interenet Connect application. It was a million to one shot but it might just work.

I did it and tried again, expecting it to fail again. In fact, I was so pessimistic that I became distracted by some other task. Another five minutes passed before I noticed that the two parallel sets of horizontal dashes had appeared to show data throughput and the magic words 'Status: Connected' had appeared.

Amazing, I thought. But then the rays of astonished delight clouded over: I may be 'connected' but I bet the bloody Web won't work becasue of some DNS nonsense.

But I was wrong - it the BBC website loaded perfectly and even my IMAP email account kicked in smoothly, which has never worked on our office network before.

I had achieved the impossible: 3G, data modem, Mac Powerbook, Nokia N73, world wide web, email all working seamlessly together. I could now take my laptop anywhere, any place, anytime. WiFi hotspots could eat my shorts - I was master of my own destiny!

And then my phone beeped and managhed to announce 'Battery Low' before dying. Bluetooth and 3G in tandem use up more energy than Lindsay Lohan after a visit to the Ladies.

I had been online for 22 minutes.

But what a glorious 22 minutes they were.