Windows Phone 7 USB tethering uncovered on Samsung phones
If you're the proud owner of a Samsung Focus or Omnia 7, you can scratch a pretty major item off the list of basic features missing from WP7: USB tethering. A couple of sites have come upon a quick and relatively easy hack …
Context & Ripple Effects
Windows Phone 7 launched with a locked-down feature set, and USB tethering was among the basics users found absent — an odd omission given the platform had been detailed months earlier, when February's leaked Windows Phone 7 specifications set expectations for a competitive OS. The discovery that Samsung's Focus and Omnia 7 already contain the capability, switched off rather than stripped out, reframes it as a policy gap instead of a hardware one.
Samsung has reason to keep its new Windows partners happy while hedging: the company reported three million Galaxy S phones shipped in the US and seven million globally since July, and its Android lineup — including this week's Continuum launch on Verizon and the panned Galaxy Tab — is where its volume sits. A quick software fix that makes its WP7 handsets more complete costs Samsung nothing and buys goodwill.
First-order effects
- Owners of the Samsung Focus and Omnia 7 gain working USB tethering immediately via the hack, closing one of the most-cited gaps against iPhone and Android rivals without waiting on Microsoft or their carrier.
- Carriers selling these phones, notably AT&T with the Focus, lose control of a feature they would typically gate behind a paid tethering plan, since the hack exposes what is natively present in the firmware.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft and its carrier partners face pressure either to enable tethering officially through an update or to patch the hole, forcing a choice between subscriber goodwill and tethering revenue.
- Rival handset makers shipping WP7 hardware will be measured against the same expectation — if the capability exists in Samsung's firmware, buyers will ask why it is off on theirs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, WP7's locked model invites a persistent hobbyist-unlock scene that surfaces disabled capabilities faster than official updates do, eroding the platform holder's control over which features ship and when.
The trend: Smartphone platforms are entering an era where community hacks routinely expose carrier- or vendor-disabled hardware capabilities, forcing Microsoft and carriers to choose between lock-in revenue and feature completeness.